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cli-sedHow do I use the commandline sed tool to edit a file?


The sed (stream editor) command line tool can be used to edit a file. This is done by using the -i flag when running sed and providing an expression to apply to the file.

For example, to replace the word hello with goodbye in a file named example.txt, the following command can be used:

sed -i 's/hello/goodbye/g' example.txt

This command will replace all occurrences of hello with goodbye in the example.txt file.

The parts of the command are:

  • sed: The command to run the stream editor.
  • -i: The flag to indicate that the changes should be applied to the file directly.
  • s/hello/goodbye/g: The expression that will be applied to the file. This expression is a substitute command, which will replace all occurrences of hello with goodbye.
  • example.txt: The name of the file to apply the expression to.

For more information about sed, see the following links:

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