Linux sed regexp replace

Unix / Linux — Regular Expressions with SED

In this chapter, we will discuss in detail about regular expressions with SED in Unix.

A regular expression is a string that can be used to describe several sequences of characters. Regular expressions are used by several different Unix commands, including ed, sed, awk, grep, and to a more limited extent, vi.

Here SED stands for stream editor. This stream-oriented editor was created exclusively for executing scripts. Thus, all the input you feed into it passes through and goes to STDOUT and it does not change the input file.

Invoking sed

Before we start, let us ensure we have a local copy of /etc/passwd text file to work with sed.

As mentioned previously, sed can be invoked by sending data through a pipe to it as follows −

The cat command dumps the contents of /etc/passwd to sed through the pipe into sed’s pattern space. The pattern space is the internal work buffer that sed uses for its operations.

The sed General Syntax

Following is the general syntax for sed −

Here, pattern is a regular expression, and action is one of the commands given in the following table. If pattern is omitted, action is performed for every line as we have seen above.

The slash character (/) that surrounds the pattern are required because they are used as delimiters.

Prints the line

Deletes the line

Substitutes the first occurrence of pattern1 with pattern2

Deleting All Lines with sed

We will now understand how to delete all lines with sed. Invoke sed again; but the sed is now supposed to use the editing command delete line, denoted by the single letter d −

Instead of invoking sed by sending a file to it through a pipe, the sed can be instructed to read the data from a file, as in the following example.

The following command does exactly the same as in the previous example, without the cat command −

The sed Addresses

The sed also supports addresses. Addresses are either particular locations in a file or a range where a particular editing command should be applied. When the sed encounters no addresses, it performs its operations on every line in the file.

The following command adds a basic address to the sed command you’ve been using −

Notice that the number 1 is added before the delete edit command. This instructs the sed to perform the editing command on the first line of the file. In this example, the sed will delete the first line of /etc/password and print the rest of the file.

The sed Address Ranges

We will now understand how to work with the sed address ranges. So what if you want to remove more than one line from a file? You can specify an address range with sed as follows −

The above command will be applied on all the lines starting from 1 through 5. This deletes the first five lines.

Try out the following address ranges −

Lines starting from the 4 th till the 10 th are deleted

Only 10 th line is deleted, because the sed does not work in reverse direction

This matches line 4 in the file, deletes that line, continues to delete the next five lines, and then ceases its deletion and prints the rest

This deletes everything except starting from 2 nd till 5 th line

This deletes the first line, steps over the next three lines, and then deletes the fourth line. Sed continues to apply this pattern until the end of the file.

This tells sed to delete the second line, step over the next line, delete the next line, and repeat until the end of the file is reached

Lines starting from 4 th till 10 th are printed

This generates the syntax error

This would also generate syntax error

Note − While using the p action, you should use the -n option to avoid repetition of line printing. Check the difference in between the following two commands −

The Substitution Command

The substitution command, denoted by s, will substitute any string that you specify with any other string that you specify.

To substitute one string with another, the sed needs to have the information on where the first string ends and the substitution string begins. For this, we proceed with bookending the two strings with the forward slash (/) character.

The following command substitutes the first occurrence on a line of the string root with the string amrood.

It is very important to note that sed substitutes only the first occurrence on a line. If the string root occurs more than once on a line only the first match will be replaced.

For the sed to perform a global substitution, add the letter g to the end of the command as follows −

Substitution Flags

There are a number of other useful flags that can be passed in addition to the g flag, and you can specify more than one at a time.

Replaces all matches, not just the first match

Replaces only NUMBER th match

If substitution was made, then prints the pattern space

If substitution was made, then writes result to FILENAME

Matches in a case-insensitive manner

In addition to the normal behavior of the special regular expression characters ^ and $, this flag causes ^ to match the empty string after a newline and $ to match the empty string before a newline

Using an Alternative String Separator

Suppose you have to do a substitution on a string that includes the forward slash character. In this case, you can specify a different separator by providing the designated character after the s.

In the above example, we have used : as the delimiter instead of slash / because we were trying to search /root instead of the simple root.

Replacing with Empty Space

Use an empty substitution string to delete the root string from the /etc/passwd file entirely −

Address Substitution

If you want to substitute the string sh with the string quiet only on line 10, you can specify it as follows −

Similarly, to do an address range substitution, you could do something like the following −

As you can see from the output, the first five lines had the string sh changed to quiet, but the rest of the lines were left untouched.

The Matching Command

You would use the p option along with the -n option to print all the matching lines as follows −

Using Regular Expression

While matching patterns, you can use the regular expression which provides more flexibility.

Check the following example which matches all the lines starting with daemon and then deletes them −

Following is the example which deletes all the lines ending with sh −

The following table lists four special characters that are very useful in regular expressions.

Matches the beginning of lines

Matches the end of lines

Matches any single character

Matches zero or more occurrences of the previous character

Matches any one of the characters given in chars, where chars is a sequence of characters. You can use the — character to indicate a range of characters.

Matching Characters

Look at a few more expressions to demonstrate the use of metacharacters. For example, the following pattern −

Matches lines that contain strings such as a+c, a-c, abc, match, and a3c

Matches the same strings along with strings such as ace, yacc, and arctic

Matches the string The and the

Matches blank lines

Matches an entire line whatever it is

Matches one or more spaces

Matches blank lines

Following table shows some frequently used sets of characters −

Matches a single lowercase letter

Matches a single uppercase letter

Matches a single letter

Matches a single number

Matches a single letter or number

Character Class Keywords

Some special keywords are commonly available to regexps, especially GNU utilities that employ regexps. These are very useful for sed regular expressions as they simplify things and enhance readability.

For example, the characters a through z and the characters A through Z, constitute one such class of characters that has the keyword [[:alpha:]]

Using the alphabet character class keyword, this command prints only those lines in the /etc/syslog.conf file that start with a letter of the alphabet −

The following table is a complete list of the available character class keywords in GNU sed.

Alphanumeric [a-z A-Z 0-9]

Alphabetic [a-z A-Z]

Blank characters (spaces or tabs)

Any visible characters (excludes whitespace)

Lowercase letters [a-z]

Printable characters (non-control characters)

Uppercase letters [A-Z]

Hex digits [0-9 a-f A-F]

Aampersand Referencing

The sed metacharacter & represents the contents of the pattern that was matched. For instance, say you have a file called phone.txt full of phone numbers, such as the following −

You want to make the area code (the first three digits) surrounded by parentheses for easier reading. To do this, you can use the ampersand replacement character −

Here in the pattern part you are matching the first 3 digits and then using & you are replacing those 3 digits with the surrounding parentheses.

Using Multiple sed Commands

You can use multiple sed commands in a single sed command as follows −

Here command1 through commandN are sed commands of the type discussed previously. These commands are applied to each of the lines in the list of files given by files.

Using the same mechanism, we can write the above phone number example as follows −

Note − In the above example, instead of repeating the character class keyword [[:digit:]] three times, we replaced it with \ , which means the preceding regular expression is matched three times. We have also used \ to give line break and this has to be removed before the command is run.

Back References

The ampersand metacharacter is useful, but even more useful is the ability to define specific regions in regular expressions. These special regions can be used as reference in your replacement strings. By defining specific parts of a regular expression, you can then refer back to those parts with a special reference character.

To do back references, you have to first define a region and then refer back to that region. To define a region, you insert backslashed parentheses around each region of interest. The first region that you surround with backslashes is then referenced by \1, the second region by \2, and so on.

Assuming phone.txt has the following text −

Try the following command −

Note − In the above example, each regular expression inside the parenthesis would be back referenced by \1, \2 and so on. We have used \ to give line break here. This should be removed before running the command.

Источник

Sed Examples: Search and Replace on Linux

Usage of sed is closely linked to that of find . Examples here focus on sed only.

To see different ways to use find , look at Linux find examples

Replace string

To modify the file in place, use sed -i instead

Replace all occurrences of foo with bar in my_file.txt.

Replace regex

sed uses extended posix regular expressions. Read more about those here

To modify the file in place, use sed -i -r in this case

The -r flag enables the use of extended posix regular expressions.

Example: replace all digits with dashes in the target file:

Replace regex with match groups

To modify the file in place, use sed -i -r instead

In order to use the results of a match in the «search» part in the «replace» part of the sed command, use «\»+match_number . For example, to add a ‘X’ to the end of all numbers in a file:

In this example, I’ve used \1 to match the first match group (match groups are stuff that’s between parentheses). If there were more, you could also use \2 , \3 and so on to represent the next matches.

Replace whole lines matching pattern

To modify the file in place, use sed -i instead

For example, replace the line that matches «FOO BAR» anywhere in it with «The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog»:

So if you had something like this:

It becomes this:

Delete lines matching pattern

To modify the file in place, use sed -i instead

Remove all lines that match the given pattern.

Replace newlines

sed is line-based, so it’s hard for it to work with newlines. Use tr instead

Although sed is line-based (so it doesn’t see across lines) there is a workaround to allow you to redefine what it considers a line.

Example: Replace newlines ( \n ) with whitespace:

Replace one or more newlines

It’s a variation of the above.

Example: Replace one or more newlines \n in file input.txt with whitespace

$ (sed -r ‘:a;N;$!ba;s/\n+/ /g’ | sed -r ‘s/\s+/ /g’) out.txt

Use with find: replace in current directory and under

For example, to replace all occurrences of «foo» with «bar» in all files in the current directory and under:

Note that the files are modified in place

Caution! «*.*» means all files! This also includes files like those under Code Versioning Tools, like SVN or GIT. Running this command on a directory that includes these files may break your repositories! use with caution!

Escape single quotes

Use double quotes as delimiters:

To modify the file in place, use sed -i instead

Источник

Вам также может понравиться

Windows или Linux: Что лучше выбрать?

Есть много причин выбирать между Windows и Linux, но

Файл владелец изменить linux

Команда Chown в Linux Chown Command in Linux (File

Установка шлюза по умолчанию linux

Настройка сети вручную Содержание Краткое описание

Чем разбить диск для linux

ИТ База знаний Курс по Asterisk Полезно — Узнать IP —