SED questions

[Ragni Singh]

Hi all,

In UNIX, using "sed", if I want to replace string 'cat' with string 'dog', it is -
sed -e 's/cat/dog'

But if I want to replace 'cat' with 'cat,newline char,dog,newline char' how do I do it ???

Any help is greatly appreciated and points will be given.

[James R. Ferguson · Accepted solution]

Hi:

You can do this:

# sed -e 's/cat/dog\^J/'

...where a backslash follows "dog" and you hold the CONTROL key plus the letter "v" down and hit the return or enter key.

Regards!

...JRF...

[S.K. Chan]

Try this ..let say the file is called "test".

$ sed 's/cat/cat> dog> /g' test > newtest

That should replace all instances of "cat" with "cat dog "

[S.K. Chan]

Sorry .. formatting is all wrong ..

$ sed 's/cat/cat\dog\/g' test > newtest

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi (again) Sanjay:

If you mean, literally. "replace 'cat' with 'cat,newline char,dog,newline char'", then:

# sed -e 's/cat/cat\^Jdog\^J/g'

...composing the ^J sequence (newline character) as I noted above.

Drop the 'g' flag if you want to do this only once per line.

Regards!

...JRF...

[Rory R Hammond]

Sanjay,

I tried all of the above and could not get them to work from my hpux command line.

the closet I could come was with the following:

sed -e "s/cat/`echo "\rdog\r"`/g" test |tr "\r" "\n" >newtest

I hope you did better. I have a url that has all kinds of handy sed one liners:
http://www-h.eng.cam.ac.uk/help/tpl/unix/sed.html

none seemed to solve your problem.

Rory