Sed, that most useful of pattern replacement tools, can be used for much more than simple string replacements in text files. This article will examine the uses of Sed for creating commands and feeding them to the shell. This can be extremely useful, especially when working on file manipulations for large batches of files at a time. Let's say for example that you've got a directory full of files, and you'd like to move them into subdirectories according to the first three characters of the filenames. This is a one-liner with sed.

Section: User Commands (1)
Updated: February 2006
Index  

NAME

sed - stream editor for filtering and transforming text  

SYNOPSIS

sed [OPTION]...