Powerfull Sed oneliners

HANDY ONE-LINERS FOR SED (Unix stream editor)       Oct. 29, 1997
compiled by Eric Pement     version 4.3
From   http://sed.sourceforge.net/grabbag/tutorials/oneliners.txt


Some snippets:

TEXT CONVERSION AND SUBSTITUTION:
# substitute (find & replace) "foo" with "bar" on each line
sed 's/foo/bar/'             # replaces only 1st instance in a line
sed 's/foo/bar/4'            # replaces only 4th instance in a line
sed 's/foo/bar/g'            # replaces ALL instances in a line

# substitute "foo" with "bar" ONLY for lines which contain "baz"
sed '/baz/s/foo/bar/g'

# substitute "foo" with "bar" EXCEPT for lines which contain "baz"
sed '/baz/!s/foo/bar/g'

SELECTIVE DELETION OF CERTAIN LINES:

# print all of file EXCEPT section between 2 regular expressions
sed '/Iowa/,/Montana/d'

SPECIAL APPLICATIONS:

# remove nroff overstrikes (char, backspace) from man pages
sed "s/.`echo \\\b`//g"    # double quotes required for Unix environment
sed 's/.\x08//g'           # hex expression for GNU sed (octal is "\010")

# get Usenet/e-mail message header
sed '/^$/q'                # deletes everything after first blank line

# get Usenet/e-mail message body
sed '1,/^$/d'              # deletes everything up to first blank line

 # get Subject header, but remove initial "Subject: " portion
sed '/^Subject: */!d; s///;q'

 # get return address header
sed '/^Reply-To:/q; /^From:/h; /./d;g;q'

 # parse out the address proper. Pulls out the e-mail address by itself
 # from the 1-line return address header (see preceding script)
sed 's/ *(.*)//; s/>.*//; s/.*[:<] *//'   # add a leading angle bracket and space to each line (quote a message)
sed 's/^/> /

 # delete leading angle bracket & space from each line (unquote a message)
sed 's/^> //'

 # remove most HTML tags (accommodates multiple-line tags)
sed -e :a -e 's/&lgt;[^<]*>/ /g;/<!--{N;s/\n/ /;ba;}'   # extract multi-part uuencoded binaries, removing extraneous header
 # info, so that only the uuencoded portion remains. Files passed to
 # sed must be passed in the proper order. Version 1 can be entered
 # from the command line; version 2 can be made into an executable
 # Unix shell script. (Modified from a script by Rahul Dhesi.)
sed '/^end/,/^begin/d' file1 file2 ... fileX | uudecode   # vers. 1
sed '/^end/,/^begin/d' $* | uudecode                      # vers. 2

 # zip up each .TXT file individually, deleting the source file and
 # setting the name of each .ZIP file to the basename of the .TXT file
 # (under DOS: the "dir /b" switch returns bare filenames in all caps).
echo @echo off >zipup.bat

OPTIMIZING FOR SPEED: If execution speed needs to be increased (due to
large input files or slow processors or hard disks), substitution will
be executed more quickly if the "find" expression is specified before
giving the "s/.../.../" instruction. Thus:

 sed 's/foo/bar/g' filename         # standard replace command
 sed '/foo/ s/foo/bar/g' filename   # executes more quickly
 sed '/foo/ s//bar/g' filename      # shorthand sed syntax
dir /b *.txt | sed "s/^\(.*\)\.TXT/pkzip -mo \1 \1.TXT/" >>zipup.bat

When the reader sees a fairly long command such as this:

 sed -e '/AAA/b' -e '/BBB/b' -e '/CCC/b' -e d

it is heartening to know that GNU sed will let you reduce it to:

 sed '/AAA/b;/BBB/b;/CCC/b;d'