Find and replace with sed

cat file.txt | sed -r "s/find/replace/"

This will replace an occurrences of the word "find" with the word "replace" on each line.

The -r switch allows you to use POSIX extended regular expressions.

To use part of the found pattern in the replacement you can use "\1", "\2" and so on, eg:

sed -r "s/(.)/ i found this: \\1/"

The above example will match any single character and prefix the string " i found this: " in front of each line

If you use the "g" option in the expression eg:

sed -r "s/(.)/ i found this: \\1/g"

This replacement will be performed for every match found on each line.

For BSD or Mac OSX please omit the -r switch, an example of this would be:

sed "s/hello/world"

Last updated: 11/07/2005