sed summary (cont)

Some basic POSIX groups:

\d = [[:digit:]], \D = [^[:digit:]].
\s = [[:whitespace:]], including space, tab .. ; \S = ?
\w = [[:alnum:]], including 0-9,a-z, A-Z; \W = ?

executing multiple commands with sed -e command

One method of combining multiple commands is to use a -e before each command:

sed -e 's/a/A/' -e 's/b/B/'
new

A "-e" isn't needed in the earlier examples because sed knows that there must always be one command. If you give sed one argument, it must be a command, and sed will edit the data read from standard input.

Reversing the restriction with !
Sometimes you need to perform an action on every line except those that match a regular expression, or those outside of a range of addresses. The "!" character, which often means not in Unix utilities, inverts the address restriction. You remember that

sed -n '/match/ p'acts like the grep command. The "-v" option to grep prints all lines that don't contain the pattern. Sed can do this with sed -n '/match/ !p'

Ranges by Line Number

You can specify a range on line numbers by inserting a comma between the numbers. To restrict a substitution to the first 100 lines, you can use:

sed '1,100 s/A/a/'

If you know exactly how many lines are in a file, you can explicitly state that number to perform the substitution on the rest of the file. In this case, assume you used wc to find out there are 532 lines in the file:

sed '101,532 s/A/a/'

An easier way is to use the special character "$," which means the last line in the file.

sed '101,$ s/A/a/'

The "$" is one of those conventions that mean "last" in utilities like cat -e, vi, and ed. "cat -e" Line numbers are cumulative if several files are edited. That is,

sed '200,300 s/A/a/' f1 f2 f3 >new

is the same as

cat f1 f2 f3 | sed '200,300 s/A/a/' >new

Transform with Y

If you wanted to change a word from lower case to upper case, you could write 26 character substitutions, converting "a" to "A," etc. Sed has a command that operates like the tr program. It is called the "y" command. For instance, to change the letters "a" through "f" into their upper case form, use:

sed 'y/abcdef/ABCDEF/' file

I could have used an example that converted all 26 letters into upper case, and while this column covers a broad range of topics, the "column" prefers a narrower format.

If you wanted to convert a line that contained a hexadecimal number (e.g. 0x1aff) to upper case (0x1AFF), you could use:

sed '/0x[0-9a-zA-Z]*/ y/abcdef/ABCDEF' file

This works fine if there are only numbers in the file. If you wanted to change the second word in a line to upper case, you are out of luck - unless you use multi-line editing. (Hey - I think there is some sort of theme here!)