Common Commands for Sed on FreeBSD

Replace string:

% sed -i .bak 's/original/new/g' test.txt    

-i Edit files in-place, saving backups with the specified extension(here it is .bak).

 

Replace the comments of C language:

% sed 's/\(\/\*\).*\(\*\/\)//g' test.c

Delete the line contains pattern string:

% sed -i .bak '/pattern_string/d'  file.txt

Add new line after pattern string:

% sed -E 's/(pattern_string)/\1\nnew line/' file.txt

-E Interpret regular expressions as extended (modern) regular expressions rather    than basic regular expressions (BRE's).

\1 Represent pattern string.

Escape single quote:

% sed 's/ones/one\x27s/'

And string ones thing will become one's thing.

Copy specific lines in a file to another file:

copy lines 10 to 15 of file1.txt into file2.txt.

% sed -n '10,15p' file1.txt > file2.txt

Non-greedy matching for ssed (super sed).

The content of file test.txt was as follows:

ssABteAstACoABnnACss

 

Non-greed matching command as follows:

% ssed -R 's/AB.*?AC/XXX/g' test.txt

 

Operation on file test.txt directly(NO BACKUP):

% ssed -i -R 's/AB.*?AC/XXX/g' test.txt

 

Then,the content of filte test.txt is as follows:

ssXXXoXXXss

 

There is another tricky way: Non-greedy match with SED regex (emulate perl's .*?)