cli-sedHow can I use the 'sed' command line utility to group text?

The 'sed' command line utility is a powerful tool for manipulating text. It can be used to group text in several ways.

For example, to group lines of text by a specific character, you can use the sed command with the -n option and a regular expression. The following example code will group lines of text by the | character:

sed -n 's/^\(.*\)|\(.*\)$/\1\n\2/p'

This example code will take the following input:

this|that
these|those

And produce the following output:

this
that
these
those

You can also use sed to group text by words. This can be done by using the -r option and a regular expression. The following example code will group lines of text by the word foo:

sed -r 's/^(.*)foo(.*)$/\1\nfoo\n\2/g'

This example code will take the following input:

foo bar
foo baz

And produce the following output:

foo
bar
foo
baz

Parts of the code:

• sed: the command line utility
• -n: the option used to group lines of text by a specific character
• -r: the option used to group lines of text by words
• s/^\(.*\)|\(.*\)$/\1\n\2/p: the regular expression used to group lines of text by the | character
• s/^(.*)foo(.*)$/\1\nfoo\n\2/g: the regular expression used to group lines of text by the word foo

Helpful links

• sed Manual
• How to Use sed to Find and Replace String in Files

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