Sed command in Unix/Linux

5 min readOct 30, 2018

sed command is used in unix/linux like operating system for editing the file or stream and it does a lot of functions like find and replace, insertion, deletion. it scans the file or stream line by line and executes command on each line. In this post I am exploring some useful sed command with examples.

Syntax

sed options [script] [inputfile]

Make man your friend, for reference or in doubt use the command $man sed

Examples

Consider the text file rk.txt as input with the following content

java is a programming language, java has a good developer community  
java is easy learn java, java follows oo principles
java uses simple syntax, python uses simple syntax

1. Replacing or substituting a string

$sed 's/java/python/' rk.txt

By default sed replaces only the first occurrence, so the above command will replace first occurrence of ‘java’ with ‘python’.
output:

python is a programming language, java has a good developer community  
python is easy learn java, java follows oo principles
python uses simple syntax, python uses simple syntax

2. Replace or substitute nth occurrence of a pattern in each line

$sed 's/java/python/2' rk.txt

The above command will replace 2nd occurrence of ‘java’ with ‘python’ in each line if the 2nd occurrence is present.
output:

java is a programming language, python has a good developer community  
java is easy learn python, java follows oo principles
java uses simple syntax, python uses simple syntax

3. Replace or substitute all occurrences of a pattern in each line

$sed 's/java/python/g' rk.txt

The above command will replace all the occurrences of ‘java’ with ‘python’
output:

python is a programming language, python has a good developer community  
python is easy learn python, python follows oo principles
python uses simple syntax, python uses simple syntax

4. Use sed with pipe

$cat rk.txt | sed 's/java/python/g'

As with all the other linux commands you can use sed in a pipe and it’s where is actual power lies. you can use sed command in a pip instead of giving the file name as argument.
output:

python is a programming language, python has a good developer community  
python is easy learn python, python follows oo principles
python uses simple syntax, python uses simple syntax

5. Replacing string on a particular line number

$sed '2 s/java/python/g' rk.txt

The above command replaces ‘java’ with python only on 3rd line of the file.
output:

java is a programming language, java has a good developer community  
python is easy learn python, python follows oo principles
java uses simple syntax, python uses simple syntax

6. Replacing string in a range of line

$sed '1,2 s/java/python/g' rk.txt

output:

python is a programming language, python has a good developer community  
python is easy learn python, python follows oo principles
java uses simple syntax, python uses simple syntax$sed '2,$ s/java/python/g' rk.txt

The above command will replace occurrence of ‘java’ with ‘python’ from 2nd line to last line
output:

python is a programming language, python has a good developer community  
python is easy learn python, python follows oo principles
python uses simple syntax, python uses simple syntax

7. Print only modified lines

$sed -n '2,$ s/java/python/gp' rk.txt

Above command will replace ‘java’ with ‘python’ from second line to last line and print only the modified lines in which the substitution performed. look for `-n’ flag
output:

python is easy learn python, python follows oo principles
python uses simple syntax, python uses simple syntax

8. Print modified lines twice

$sed '2,$ s/java/python/gp' rk.txt

Above command will replace ‘java’ with ‘python’ from second line to last line and print twice the modified lines in which the substitution performed.
output:

java is a programming language, java has a good developer community  
python is easy learn python, python follows oo principles
python is easy learn python, python follows oo principles
python uses simple syntax, python uses simple syntax
python uses simple syntax, python uses simple syntax

9. Deleting nth line

$sed '2d' rk.txt

Above command will delete 2nd line from rk.txt
output:

java is a programming language, java has a good developer community  
java uses simple syntax, python uses simple syntax

10. Deleting lines in a range

$sed '1,2d' rk.txt

Above command will delete lines from 1 to 2.
output:

java uses simple syntax, python uses simple syntax$sed '2,$d' rk.txt

Above command will delete lines from 2 to last.
output:

java is a programming language, java has a good developer community

11. Insert a blank line after each line

$sed G rk.txt

output:

java is a programming language, java has a good developer community  java is easy learn java, java follows oo principlesjava uses simple syntax, python uses simple syntax

For inserting two blank lines use following command

$sed 'G;G' rk.txt

12. View/Print lines in a range

$sed -n '2,3p' rk.txt

Above command will print 2nd to 3rd line from rk.txt
output:

java is easy learn java, java follows oo principles
java uses simple syntax, python uses simple syntax

For print nth line use following

$sed -n '2p' rk.txt

Above command will print 2nd line from rk.txt
output:

java is easy learn java, java follows oo principles

13. View/Print lines except a given range

$sed '2,3d' rk.txt

Above command will print all lines from file rk.txt except lines from 2nd to 3rd
output:

java is a programming language, java has a good developer community

14. View/Print non-consecutive lines/range from a file

$sed -n -e '1p' -e '3p' rk.txt

Above command will print 1st and 3rd line from file rk.txt
output:

java is a programming language, java has a good developer community  
java uses simple syntax, python uses simple syntax

Notice the -e flag, using this flag we can append multiple editing command and each command will be executed in sequence

15. In place editing of a file

$sed -i 's/java/python/g' rk.txt

Above command will do the substitution in place directly in rk.txt file, notice the `-i’ flag, without this flag the edit operation does not affect the original file.

16. Inplace editing of a file with backup

$sed -i '.original' 's/java/python/g' rk.txt

Above command will make changes in original file rk.txt and will make a backup of file with ‘.original’ extension, After executing the above command there will be two files rk.txt and rk.txt.original. This is recommended way of doing in place editing, in case if we do any mistake we will have a backup file.

17. Regular expression: print line which matches a pattern

$sed -n '/programming/ p' rk.txt

Above command will print all the lines which has ‘programming’ in it.
output:

java is a programming language, java has a good developer community

18. Delete lines which matches a pattern

sed  '/programming/ d' rk.txt

Above command will delete all the lines which has ‘programming’.
output:

java is easy learn java, java follows oo principles
java uses simple syntax, python uses simple syntax

19. Replace in lines which matches given pattern

$sed '/programming/ s/java/python/g' rk.txt

Above command will replace ‘java’ with ‘python’ in each line which has ‘programming’ in it.
output:

python is a programming language, python has a good developer community  
java is easy learn java, java follows oo principles
java uses simple syntax, python uses simple syntax