Useful sed scripts and patterns

Sed is probably the one tool I owe my career most to. I made a living mostly on it for a few years as an ops guy, and I didn't even know half of these use cases. The variable delimiter alone was such a beautifully thought out decision that made everything easier, that I likely would have never considered had I written it.

…and I closed it as a dupe already. I was seconds slower than the other contributor. :)

sed actually provides a scripting language, and s/foo/bar is just statement in that language. This surprised me when I first learned about it.

There are a ton of little errors in this post (at the time of my leaving this comment, of course): the variable delimiter example is missing the close _, the first word example is missing the open ', and the except line 5 example is missing a space; meanwhile, these snippets will cause bad habits, such as thinking about "words" as "things involving letters", using -r instead of -E, and a massive knowledge gap with respect to appropriate use of semicolons... I'm also really confused as to why sed is suddenly "s" in one of the examples. This just isn't a very good reference, and I'm not sure if the author thinks about how "c" works, but it really needs a \ afterwards, no matter what the one specific version of sed you are using might allow :/. As someone who loves sed so much he nigh unto regrets how much he uses it: "beware".

FWIW, I'd argue that the path to true sed mastery eventually goes through the hold space, which isn't mentioned here. For some real fun, and an exercise that might change how you mentally model what sed is capable of, check out SedSokoban.

https://aurelio.net/projects/sedsokoban/