Bash: A Better Way to Sed

Tue, 01 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

So I frequently find myself in a situation where I need to modify files on a fairly programmatic basis, so sed has become a friend of mine for a lot of these situations. So lets start with some basic sed…

If I have a file..

 bash
 
 
cat /etc/file.txt
blah
blah
teststring
blah
blah

And I want to replace “teststring” with “productionvalue” then I could use sed.

bash

sed -i 's/teststring/productionvalue/g' /etc/file.txt

 bash
 
 
cat /etc/file.txt
blah
blah
productionvalue
blah
blah

This is all well and good, but recently I found a better way…

Perl on the bin

Bash: A Better Way to Sed