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cat cmp comm csplit cut diff diff3 ed egrep ex expand fgrep fmt gettext grep groff head join less look more nl od paste pr sed shuf sort split tac tail tee tr unexpand uniq wc

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binary from-file left-column no-ignore-file-name-case sdiff-merge-assist strip-trailing-cr to-file suppress-common-lines unidirectional-new-file

Display text of $FILE, wrapping long lines

fold $FILE

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Print first 8 characters of $FILE

head -c8 $FILE

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Number all lines, including blank lines

nl -b a file
nl --body-numbering=a file

Merge lines of files

Make a .csv file from two lists

paste -d ',' file1 file2

Transpose rows

paste -s file1 file2

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Run sed commands in $SCRIPT on $FILE

sed -f $SCRIPT $FILE

Suppress automatic printing of pattern space

sed -n
sed --quiet
sed --silent

sed ("Stream-oriented editor") is typically used for applying repetitive edits across all lines of multiple files. In particular it is, alongside awk one of the two primary commands which accept regular expressions in Unix systems.

Invocation syntax has two forms:

# Inline
sed options 'instruction' $FILE

# "Command file"
sed options -f $SCRIPT $FILE

sed instructions are made of addresses and procedures . Sources do not use consistent terminology to describe the two components of most sed commands:

:--- | :--- sed 'pattern {procedure}' file | [SA: 14] sed 'address {action}' file | [YUG: 449] sed 'address {instruction}' file | [PGL: 565]

Zero, one, or two addresses can precede a procedure.

• In the absence of an address, the procedure is executed over every line of input
• With one address, the procedure will be executed over every line of input that matches
• With two addresses, the procedure will be executed over groups of lines whereby:
  • The first address selects the first line in the first group
  • The second address selects the next subsequent line that it matches, which becomes the last line in the first group
  • If no match for the second address is found, it point to the end of the file
  • After the match, the selection process for the next group begins by searching for a match to the first address Addressing can be done in one of two ways:

1. Line addressing, specifying line numbers separated by a comma (e.g. 3,7p); $ represents the last line of input
2. Context addressing, using a regular expression enclosed by forward slashes (e.g. /From:/p)

Edit the file in-place, but save a backup copy of the original with {suffix} appended to - the filename

-i=suffix

Display first 3 lines ^{YUG: 450}

sed '3q' emp.lst

Display first 5 lines, similar to head -5 emp.lst [PGL:569]

sed '5q' new

Pipe output of ps to sed, displaying top 10 memory-intensive processes

ps axch -o cmd,%mem --sort=-%mem | sed 11q

Pipe output of ps to sed, displaying top 10 CPU-intensive processes

ps axch -o cmd:15,%cpu --sort=-%cpu | sed 11q

Display first two lines of file Without -n, each line will be printed twice

sed -n '1,2p' emp.lst

Prepending ! to the procedure reverses the sense of the command ^{YUG: 450}

sed -n '3,$!p' emp.lst

Display a range of lines

sed -n '9,11p' emp.lst

Use the -e flag to precede multiple instructions

sed -n -e '1,2p' -e '7,9p' -e '$p' emp.lst

Delete lines Delete second line alone

sed '2d' myfile

Delete a range of lines: from the 2nd through the 3rd

sed '2,3d' myfile

Delete a range of lines, from the first occurrence of 'second' to the line with the first occurrence of 'fourth'

sed '/second/,/fourth/d' myfile

Print all of a file except for specific lines Suppress any line with 'test' in it

sed '/test/d' myfile

Suppress from the 3rd line to EOF

sed '3,$d' myfile

Replace text Replace the first instance of the | character with : and display the first two lines [YUG:455]

sed 's/|/:/ emp.lst | head -2

Replace all instances of the | character with :, displaying the first two lines [YUG:455]

sed 's/|/:/g' emp.lst | head -2

Substitute HTML tags:

sed 's/<I>/<EM>/g'

These commands will replace "director" with "executive director"

sed 's/director/executive director/' emp.lst

sed 's/director/executive &/' emp.lst

sed '/director/s//executive &/' emp.lst

[YUG: 456-457] Searching for text
Equivalent to grep MA *

sed -n '/MA/p' *

Stringing sed statements together with pipe Take lines beginning with "fake" and remove all instances of "fake.", piping them... remove all parentheses with content and count lines of output (results)

sed -n '/^fake/s/fake\.//p' * | sed -nr 's/\(.*\)//p' | wc -l

Take lines of all files in CWD beginning with "fake" and remove all instances of string "fake." Then remove all parentheses with any content within them and print only the top 10 lines

sed -ne '/^fake/p' * | sed -n 's/fake\.//p' | sed -nr 's/\(.*\)//p' | sed 11q

Count the number of pipes replaced by piping output to cmp, which will use the -l option to output byte numbers of differing values, then counting the lines of output (YUG:456)

sed 's/|/:/g' emp.lst | cmp -l - emp.lst | wc -l

Sequence from 1 to 15

seq -f "%03g" 15

Sequence from 5 to 99, separated by a space instead of a newline

seq -s " " 5 99

Sequence every third number from 5 to 20

seq 5 320

Sequence from 1 to 8

seq 8

Print random selection of integers from {x} to {y} (inclusive) without replacement

shuf -i x-y

Print random selection of integers from {x} to {y} (inclusive), with replacement

shuf -i x-y -r

Shuffle items separated by newline in file cards.txt, displaying only one ¹⁰

shuf -n 1 items.txt

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Sort by space-delimited columns. Processes consuming the most memory will be at the bottom ²³

ps aux | sort -nk 4

Processes consuming the most CPU will be at the bottom

ps aux | sort -nk 3

Output last lines beginning at 30th line from the start

tail -n=+30
tail --lines=+30

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Change the case of a string [23]

tr [:upper:] [:lower:]

Remove a character or set of characters from a string or line of output

tr -d "text"

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