Sed Tutorials
If you have written anything about sed - whether an introduction, how sed got you out of a
real-life situation, or perhaps an advanced technique you've discovered - you may like have
your work published here. Your contribution will be very
welcome.
Intros
- sed one-liners (18kb)
-
The essential, official compendium of useful sed one-liners. Organised into sections by
usage, such as file spacing, line numbering, selective line removal/deletion and
optimisation.
- The sed FAQ v15 (168kb)
-
- Another sed
FAQ
-
And here is another sed FAQ, by a different person.
- Do it with sed (51kb)
-
By
Carlos Jorge G.Duarte. A comprehensive and
leisurely résumé. Contains many interesting examples, and a useful command
summary.
- SED - A Non-interactive Text Editor
(32kb)
-
By Lee E. McMahon (1978). The definitive introduction, this well-known document used to
be distributed with UNIX systems. It examines each of sed's functions in depth and
includes useful examples.
- Program state in sed (4kb)
-
By Greg Ubben. A nice introduction to advanced sed, showing how to mantain state across
lines.
- Introduction to Unix's SED editor
- By F. Curtis Michel, Rice University, Houston.
Advanced topics
- Using sed to create a book index (12kb)
-
Eric Pement of Cornerstone magazine shows how he used sed and other
utilities to massage an unsorted list of book references into an index.
- Using lookup tables with s/// (9kb)
-
Part 1 of Greg Ubben's analysis of a complex sed script he wrote to sort, delimit and
number an input file containing tabulated data. Lookup tables are a powerful technique
for the serious seder's armoury.
- A lookup-table counter (11kb)
-
Part 2 of Greg's script analysis looks at how he implemented a counter using lookup
tables. This complex problem is described step by step from the basics, following through
Greg's reasoning until we finally reach the solution.
- Counting words (3kb)
Adding a list of decimals (3kb)
- Greg explains how to count words and how to add a list of decimal numbers using a simple
analog format.
Miscellaneous
- When seemingly obvious scripts fail (2kb)
-
sed FAQ author Eric Pement explains why sometimes you cannot get your
one-liner right.
- Towers of Hanoi with sed (18kb)
-
A document which shows how to make sed solve the classic Towers of Hanoi
game.
- Proposals for a custom sed (18kb)
- A list of proposals to make sed more versatile without sacrificing its speed and overall
philosophy. I implemented a few of these in super-sed and in GNU sed 4.0.
Updated 7 Oct 2006