I'm looking for a Unix command that will allow me to search/replace in a file - I need to replace all commas in a certain file with spaces. I need to do this in a script and I'm looking to avoid parsing/reading the file line by line. Is there a simple unix command that will allow me to do this?
sed 's/,/ /g' filename >resultfile
You can use awk, sed, vi, ex or even Perl, PHP etc ... depends what you are proficient with.
sed example:
sed -i 's/,/ /g' filename_here
Related
I have a very large file where I need to replace the characters \x01\n with the character \n. How would this be done with sed? So far I have:
$ sed -i 's/\x01\n/\n' file
extra characters at the end of d command
But perhaps I'm missing a few escape characters.
Don't write \n in the line oriented sed:
sed -i 's/\x01$//' file
I think you are just missing the closing '/':
$ sed -i 's/\x01\n/\n/' file
This might work for you (GNU sed):
sed -zi 's/\x01\n/\n/g' file
This slurps in the whole (or parts delimited by \x00) file and replaces \x01\n by \n globally.
I have a project directory with folders containing .html files. I want to find those files which have the pattern -
'btn-primary.*{.*Save'
And replace the
'btn-primary' word with 'btn-primary Save'
only in those lines.
What I have done:
grep -rl -e 'btn-primary.*{Save' . |xargs sed -i 's/btn-primary/btn-primary Save/g'
What this did:
This found all files that have that pattern, that's okay. Then, sed ran on all of those files and replaced 'btn-primary' with 'btn-primary save' wherever it got - which is not what I want
What I want: to replace on those lines where there is 'Save' somewhere after 'btn-primary'.
Any help will be very much appreciated.
Regards,
Rahul
Why are you using grep at all? Sed does pattern matching:
sed -e 's/btn-primary\(.*{.*Save\)/btn-primary Save\1/g'
or:
sed -e 's/\(btn-primary\)\(.*{.*Save\)/\1 Save\2/g'
If you are using grep to try to trim down the number of files that sed will operate on, you're fooling yourself if you believe that is more efficient. By doing that, you will read every file that doesn't match only once, but every file that does match will be read twice. If you only use sed, every file will be read only once.
New to sed, so please bear with me...
I have a php file which contains the following line:
define('TARGET_A','044');
Id like to find that line and replace it with the following using sed:
define('TARGET_K','076');
I have tried:
$ sed -i 's/define\(\'TARGET_A\',\'044\'\)\;/define\(\'TARGET_K\',\'076\'\)\;/' myfile.php
I have tried SEVERAL variations, tried escaping the parens and removing the semicolon, nothing seems to work
ANY help at all GREATLY appreciated, thanks
That's a lot of escaping. How about... no escaping at all?
sed -i '.bak' "s/define('TARGET_A','044');/define('TARGET_K','076');/" myfile.php
Example:
cternus#astarael:~⟫ cat myfile.php
define('TARGET_A','044');
cternus#astarael:~⟫ sed -i '.bak' "s/define('TARGET_A','044');/define('TARGET_K','076');/" myfile.php
cternus#astarael:~⟫ cat myfile.php
define('TARGET_K','076');
This worked for me:
$sed -i "s/define('TARGET_A','044');/define('TARGET_K','076');/" myfile.php
I changed the argument string delimiter to make it simpler.
You can't escape 's in a '-delimited script so you need to escape back to shell with '\'' whenever you need a '. You might be tempted to use " to delimit the script instead but then you're opening it up to shell variable expansion, etc. so you need to be careful about what goes in your script and escape some characters to stop the shell from expanding them. It's much more robust (and generally makes your scripts simpler) to just stick to single quotes and escape back to shell just for the parts you NEED to:
$ sed 's/define('\''TARGET_A'\'','\''044'\'');/define('\''TARGET_K'\'','\''076'\'');/' file
define('TARGET_K','076');
I would like to use sed to remove all occurances of this line if and only if it is this
<ab></ab>
If this line, I would not want to delete it
<ab>keyword</ab>
My attempt that's not working:
sed '/<ab></ab>/d'
Thanks for any insight. I'm not sure what's wrong as I should not have to escape anything?
I'm using a shell script named temp to execute this. My command is this:
cat foobar.html | ./temp
This is my temp shell script:
#!/bin/sh
sed -e '/td/!d' | sed '/<ab></ab>/d'
It looks like we have a couple of problems here. The first is with the / in the close-tag. sed uses this to delimit different parts of the command. Fortunately, all we have to do is escape it with \. Try:
sed '/<ab><\/ab>/d'
Here's an example on my machine:
$ cat test
<ab></ab>
<ab></ab>
<ab>test</ab>
$ sed '/<ab><\/ab>/d' test
<ab>test</ab>
$
The other problem is that I'm not sure what the purpose of sed -e '/td/!d' is. In it's default operating mode, you don't need to tell it not to delete something; just tell it exactly what you want to delete.
So, to do this on a file called input.html:
sed '/<ab><\/ab>/d' input.html
Or, to edit the file in-place, you can just do:
sed -i -e '/<ab><\/ab>/d' input.html
Additionally, sed lets you use any character you want as a delimiter; you don't have to use /. So if you'd prefer not to escape your input, you can do:
sed '\#<ab></ab>#d' input.html
Edit
In the comments, you mentioned wanting to delete lines that only contain </ab> and nothing else. To do that, you need to do what's called anchoring the match. The ^ character represents the beginning of the line for anchoring, and $ represents the end of the line.
sed '/^<\/ab>$/d' input.html
This will only match a line that contains (literally) </ab> and nothing else at all, and delete the line. If you want to match lines that contain whitespace too, but no text other than </ab>:
sed '/^[[:blank:]]*<\/ab>[[:blank:]]*$/d' input.html
[[:blank:]]* matches "0 or more whitespace characters" and is called a "POSIX bracket expression".
I'm trying to do the opposite of this question, replacing Unix line endings with Windows line endings, so that I can use SQL Server bcp over samba to import the file. I have sed installed but not dos2unix. I tried reversing the examples but to no avail.
Here's the command I'm using.
sed -e 's/\n/\r\n/g' myfile
I executed this and then ran od -c myfile, expecting to see \r\n where there used to be \n. But there all still \n. (Or at least they appear to be. The output of od overflows my screen buffer, so I don't get to see the beginning of the file).
I haven't been able to figure out what I'm doing wrong. Any suggestions?
When faced with this, I use a simple perl one-liner:
perl -pi -e 's/\n/\r\n/' filename
because sed behavior varies, and I know this works.
What is the problem with getting dos2unix onto the machine?
What is the platform you are working with?
Do you have GNU sed or regular non-GNU sed?
On Solaris, /usr/bin/sed requires:
sed 's/$/^M/'
where I entered the '^M' by typing controlV controlM. The '$' matches at the end of the line, and replaces the end of line with the control-M. You can script that, too.
Mechanisms expecting sed to expand '\r' or '\\r' to control-M are going to be platform-specific, at best.
You don't need the -e option.
$ matches the endline character. This sed command will insert a \r character before the end of line:
sed 's/$/\r/' myfile
Just adding a \r (aka ^M, see Jonathan Leffler's answer) in front of \n is not safe because the file might have mixed mode EOL, so then you risk ending up with some lines becomming \r\r\n. The safe thing to do is first remove all '\r' characters, and then insert (a single) \r before \n.
#!/bin/sh
sed 's/^M//g' ${1+"$#"} | sed 's/$/^M/'
Updated to use ^M.
sed 's/\([^^M]\)$/\0^M/' your_file
This makes sure you only insert a \r when there is no \r before \n. This worked for me.
Try using:
echo " this is output" > input
sed 's/$/\r/g' input |od -c
Maybe if you try it this way
cat myfile | sed 's/\n/\r\n/g' > myfile.win
will work, from my understanding your just making the replacements to the console output, you need to redirect output to a file, in this case myfile.win, then you could just rename it to whatever you want. The whole script would be (running inside a directory full of this kind of files):
#!/bin/bash
for file in $(find . -type f -name '*')
do
cat $file | sed 's/\n/\r\n/g' > $file.new
mv -f $file.new $file
done