I've been seeing a lot of sed
lately, and I find it to be a rather confusing command.
The manpages weren't particularly helpful, but I do know that it can be used for parsing the output of other commands.
What exactly is sed
and what are it's uses? I'm looking for a comprehensive answer covering what sed
is, what commonly it is used for, and some basic examples/syntax.
Best Answer
In basic usage it is used for 'search and replace' with strings.
echo "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" | sed 's/dog/cat/'
returns
"The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy cat"
Sed really shines when regular expressions are used with it.
You might like to take a look at this article about
sed
, its quite comprehensive.