Nine Examples of sed and tr with Regular Expressions

Both tr and sed can modify text in the command line interface. tr is GNU Translate and sed is the GNU Stream Editor. Here are some examples I find myself using over and over.

Delete the whole line if any part of it matches the pattern #

$ sed '/a/d' months.txt
june
july
september
october
november
december

$ sed '/er/d' months.txt
january
february
march
april
may
june
july
august

$ sed '/r/d' months.txt
may
june
july
august

KEEP the line if any part of it matches the pattern #

$ sed '/r/!d' months.txt
january
february
march
april
september
october
november
december

$ sed '/er/!d' months.txt
september
october
november
december

Remove blank lines #

$ cat months.txt | sed "/^[[:space:]]*$/d"`

Remove ING from the ends of words #

TR fails here because it looks for single letters but SED works for the ING pattern.

$ echo  "Running and scrambling to see the mayor!" |  tr -d "ing"
Ru ad scrambl to see the mayor!

$ echo  "Running and scrambling to see the mayor!" |  sed "s/ing//g"
Runn and scrambl to see the mayor!

Any character can be used as the delimiter #

You don't need to always delimit with a slash.
The following are equivalent; both will replace lowercase vowels with an x.

sed s_[aeiou]_x_g
sed s/[aeiou]/x/g

Escaping the ? or + operator #

Unlike '*', both '+' (one or more) and '?' (zero or one) must be escaped.

$ echo "The       great wheel in the  sky." | sed "s_ \+_x_g"
Thexgreatxwheelxinxthexsky.
$ echo "The       great wheel in the  sky." | sed "s_ \?_x_g"
xTxhxexxxxxxxgxrxexaxtxwxhxexexlxixnxtxhxexxsxkxyx.x

• Next: Linux places
• Previous: Exercise Every Day