I am having trouble with Sed - linux

I am trying to use the sed command to replace this line:
charmm.c36a4.20140107.newcali4.fixhcali.grange.b
with:
charmm.20140911.c36a4.3rd.ghost2.model3rd
When I use:
sed -i '/s/firstline/secondline/g'
It doesn't work. I think the periods are messing it up. How do I get around this?

sed uses regular expressions, so . matches any character. If you want to only match the . character itself, tell sed to look for \.
so to change the first line into the second line:
sed -e 's/charmm\.c36a4.20140107\.newcali4\.fixhcali\.grange\.b/charmm.20140911.c36a4.3rd.ghost2.model3rd/g' < filetochange >newfile
Here, I added "g" so it does it globally, ie, if there are several instances on the same line, all will be changed. If you remove the "g", it will only change the first occurence on each line.
It reads from filetochange and writes to newfile
If you do :
sed -i -e 's/charmm\.c36a4.20140107\.newcali4\.fixhcali\.grange\.b/charmm.20140911.c36a4.3rd.ghost2.model3rd/g' filetochange
it will directly do the change in "filetochange" ... but please be careful, a badly written sed -i could mess up the file and make it unusable

The s command follows this syntax:
s/pattern/replacement/
You need to drop the / in front of the sed command.

Related

How to make GNU sed remove certain characters from a line

I have a following line;
�5=?�#A00165:69:HKJ3YDMXX:1:1101:16812:7341 1:N:0:TCTTAAAG
and would like to remove characters, �5=?� in front of #. So the desired output looks as follows;
#A00165:69:HKJ3YDMXX:1:1101:16812:7341 1:N:0:TCTTAAAG
I used gnu sed (v4.8)with a following argument;
sed "s/.*#/#/"'
but this did not remove �5=?� thought it worked in the GNU sed live editor.
At this point, I really appreciate any help on this.
My system is 3.10.0-1160.71.1.el7.x86_64
Using sed, remove everything up to the first occurance of #
$ sed 's/^[^#]*//' input_file
#A00165:69:HKJ3YDMXX:1:1101:16812:7341 1:N:0:TCTTAAAG
This might work for you (GNU sed):
sed -E 's/(\o357\o277\o275)5=\?\1//g' file
This removes all occurrences of �5=?�.
N.B. To translate the octal strings use sed -n l file to display the file as is. The triplets \357\277\275 can be matched in the LHS of the substitute command by using \o357\o277\o275.

Sed how to find and replace a value using a bash variable [duplicate]

I have a configuration file (gpsd.default) containing data with the following format:
# If you must specify a non-NMEA driver, uncomment and modify the next line
GPSD_SOCKET="/var/run/gpsd.sock"
GPSD_OPTIONS=""
GPS_DEVICES=""
I am making a change on the file with sed:
sed -i 's/^GPS_DEVICES="".*/GPS_DEVICES="dev/ttyUSB1"/' /etc/default/gpsd.default
or
sed -i '4s/^.*/GPS_DEVICES="dev/ttyUSB1"/' /etc/default/gpsd.default
The above sed command returns error:
sed: bad option in substitution expression
Because the new line contains "/" in its expression.
How to update my sed command to make it work?
This is because you are using a regex containing /, which is the same character sed uses as delimiter.
Just change the sed delimiter to another one, for example ~:
sed -i 's~^GPS_DEVICES="".*~GPS_DEVICES="dev/ttyUSB1"~' /etc/default/gpsd.default
By the way, since you are changing files in /etc, you may want to use -i.bak, so that the original file gets backed up. It is a good practice to prevent loss of important information.
You should update your sed command to this.
sed -i 's/^GPS_DEVICES=\"\".*/GPS_DEVICES=\"dev\/ttyUSB1\"/' /etc/default/gpsd.default

Conditional replace using sed

My question is probably rather simple. I'm trying to replace sequences of strings that are at the beginning of lines in a file. For example, I would like to replace any instance of the pattern "GN" with "N" or "WR" with "R", but only if they are the first 2 characters of that line. For example, if I had a file with the following content:
WRONG
RIGHT
GNOME
I would like to transform this file to give
RONG
RIGHT
NOME
I know i can use the following to replace any instance of the above example;
sed -i 's/GN/N/g' file.txt
sed -i 's/WR/R/g' file.txt
The issue is that I want this to happen only if the above patterns are the first 2 characters in any given line. Possibly an IF statement, although i'm not sure what the condition would look like. Any pointers in the right direction would be much appreciated, thanks.
just add the circumflex, remove g suffix (unnecessary, since you want at most one replacement), you can also combine them in one script.
sed -i 's/^GN/N/;s/^WR/R/' file.txt
Use the start-of-string regexp anchor ^:
sed -i 's/^GN/N/' file.txt
sed -i 's/^WR/R/' file.txt
Since sed is line-oriented, start-of-string == start-of-line.

Sed error : bad option in substitution expression

I have a configuration file (gpsd.default) containing data with the following format:
# If you must specify a non-NMEA driver, uncomment and modify the next line
GPSD_SOCKET="/var/run/gpsd.sock"
GPSD_OPTIONS=""
GPS_DEVICES=""
I am making a change on the file with sed:
sed -i 's/^GPS_DEVICES="".*/GPS_DEVICES="dev/ttyUSB1"/' /etc/default/gpsd.default
or
sed -i '4s/^.*/GPS_DEVICES="dev/ttyUSB1"/' /etc/default/gpsd.default
The above sed command returns error:
sed: bad option in substitution expression
Because the new line contains "/" in its expression.
How to update my sed command to make it work?
This is because you are using a regex containing /, which is the same character sed uses as delimiter.
Just change the sed delimiter to another one, for example ~:
sed -i 's~^GPS_DEVICES="".*~GPS_DEVICES="dev/ttyUSB1"~' /etc/default/gpsd.default
By the way, since you are changing files in /etc, you may want to use -i.bak, so that the original file gets backed up. It is a good practice to prevent loss of important information.
You should update your sed command to this.
sed -i 's/^GPS_DEVICES=\"\".*/GPS_DEVICES=\"dev\/ttyUSB1\"/' /etc/default/gpsd.default

replace unknown line in file linux command

I am trying to change a line with a pattern in a textual file using Linux bash.
I tried the sed command:
sed -i 's/old/new/' < file.txt
The issue with this command line I have to specify the exact "old" word. I want to change thousands of files where the old word has a pattern like this: old1(, old2(,old3(,....old10000(
I would like to change the oldxxx( in all files to old1(
Any ideas how to do this?
You can use something like:
sed -i 's/old[0-9]\{1,\}(/old1(/' file.txt
This matches "old" followed by one or more digits and a "(" and replaces it with "old1(".
If your version of sed supports extended regular expressions, you can use:
sed -r -i 's/old[0-9]+\(/old1(/' file.txt
instead, which does the same thing. On some versions of sed, the -E switch is used instead of -r.
If you have more than one instance of the pattern "oldXX(" on the same line, you may also want to the g modifier (s/.../.../g) to do a global replacement.

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