Saturday 31 October 2015

SED commands which can be used frequently to reduce coding time

This blog talks about the most usable “sed” commands in a day-to-day life to reduce coding time.
Nowadays, in IT industry many tasks are common and most of us are doing some repetitive jobs which consumes a lot of time. Some tasks are really very boring like “deleting words” or “inserting or replacing some text” in the file.

For one or two file, it is easy to do modification manually but when there is a number of files required same modification then we generally use “sed” and “awk” command which makes our life easier.

Following are the 10 most usable sed commands:


1. For doing search and replace in the file globally:
  • sed –i ‘s/OLD_PATTERN/NEW_PATTERN/g’ filename
          Example: sed –i ‘s/Hi/Hello/g’ myfile
          Data in myfile before sed command:
              Hi
              How are you?
              Are you busy?
              Have you take lunch?
              I am going to mall.

          Data in myfile after sed command:
              Hello
              How are you?
              Are you busy?
              Have you take lunch?
              I am going to mall.

2. Appending any line after specific pattern matched in the file:
  • sed -i "/PATTERN/a\  LINE_TO_BE_ADDED" filename
          Example: sed –i “Hello/a\ I am Munjal” myfile
          Data in myfile after sed command:
              Hello
              I am Munjal
              How are you?
              Are you busy?
              Have you take lunch?
              I am going to mall.

3. Deleting any line which contain specific pattern:
  • sed –i ‘/PATTERN/d’ filename
          Example: sed –i ‘/Munjal/d’ myfile
          Data in myfile after sed command:
              Hello
              How are you?
              Are you busy?
              Have you take lunch?
              I am going to mall.

4. Deleting all lines from starting match to ending match:
  • sed -i '/STARTING_MATCH_PATTERN/,/ENDING_MATCH_PATTERN/d' filename
          Example: sed –i ‘s/How are you/,/Have you take lunch/d’ myfile
          Data in myfile after sed command:
              Hello
              I am going to mall.


5. Case insensitive search and replace:
  • sed -i 's/OLD_PATTERN/NEW_PATTERN/I' filename
          Example: sed –i ‘/hello/Hi/I’ myfile
          Data in myfile after sed command:
              Hi
              I am going to mall.

6. Inserting a blank line above any pattern:
  • sed -i ‘s/PATTERN/\n&/g’ filename
          Example: sed –i ‘/going/\n&/g’ myfile
          Data in myfile after sed command:
              Hi

              I am going to mall.


7. Deleting multiple lines after pattern match with matching line:
  • sed -i '/PATTERN/,+Nd' filename 
          Example: sed –i ‘/How are you/,+2d’ myfile
          Data in myfile before sed command:
              Hello
              How are you?
              Are you busy?
              Have you take lunch?
              I am going to mall.

          Data in myfile after sed command:
              Hello
              I am going to mall.


8. Inserting multiple lines in the file from another file:
  • sed -i '/  PATTERN/r filename_to_add_lines' filename
          Example: sed –i ‘/Are you busy/r yourfile’ myfile
          Data in myfile before sed command:
              Hello
              How are you?
              Are you busy?
              Have you take lunch?
              I am going to mall.

          Data in “yourfile”:
              I am not busy.
              I just wake up.

          Data in myfile after sed command:
              Hello
              How are you?
              Are you busy?
              I am not busy.
              I just wake up.
              Have you take lunch?
              I am going to mall.


9. Converting multiple blank line to single blank line:
  • sed –i ‘/^$/N;/^\n$/D’ filename
          By using above sed command, it replaces multiple consecutive blank lines with single blank line which looks better during reviewing the code.


10. Changing the pattern by grouping words:
  • sed –i ‘s/\(.*\)PATTERN\(.*\)/\2PATTERN\1/g’ filename
          Example: sed –i ‘s/\(.*\) are \(.*\)/\2 are \1/g’ myfile
          Data in myfile after sed command:
              Hello
              you? are How
              Are you busy?
              I am not busy.
              I just wake up.
              Have you take lunch?
              I am going to mall.

11. Adding a new line before pattern match

  • sed -i '/PATTERN/i LINE' filename
12. Adding a new line after pattern match
  • sed -i '/PATTERN/a LINE' filename

Reference:
(1) http://www.grymoire.com/Unix/Sed.html
(2) http://www.computerhope.com/unix/used.htm