How exactly do I create a sed script and use it to edit a file? [duplicate]

Putting commands in a file

Put these lines in a script file named script.sed.

4i\ s/,/\t\t/ s/,/ / 

Then run it like this:

$ sed -i -f script.sed baconFile 

Making a standalone sed script

if you want it to be a single executable then do this:

#/bin/bash sed -i ' 4i\ s/,/\t\t/ s/,/ / ' "$@" 

Put the above lines into a file called script.bash, make it executable (chmod +x script.bash, and run it like this:

$ script.bash baconFile 

Creating the script file

You can use this method to make the file I mentioned above.

$ cat > script.bash <<EOF #!/bin/bash 4i\ s/,/\t\t/ s/,/ / EOF 

This will make the script file. You can confirm using this command:

$ cat script.bash #!/bin/bash 4i\ s/,/\t\t/ s/,/ / 

sed -i '4i\ s/,/\t\t/ s/,/ /' baconFile 

sed works like most interpreters, multiple commands can be on separate lines or delimited by ;. if you don't have GNU sed your first line may cause an error.

To create a sed script, you just give the absolute path to your sed interpreter in your shebang. and make sure the file is executable.

#!/bin/sed -f s/foo/bar/ chmod u+x foo ./foo <<<foo bar 

or the script could be called along with the sed command. sed -i -f foo file

You need the -f option sed -f sed-script

You can write a bash or korn shell script to do this. If you want to make it dynamic, you can make it so it takes in a file name as a parameter and you can run these sed commands on any file you want.

Create a new file, say updatefile.sh

#!/bin/bash #$1 is the first parameter being passed when calling the script. The variable filename will be used to refer to this. filename=$1 sed '4i\ ' filename sed 's/,/\t\t/' filename sed 's/,/ /' filename 

You can then run updatefile.sh baconFile which will run all three sed commands for the file baconFile.

Also, the g option in sed will update all occurrences of the variable in the file. For example:

sed 's/,/ /g' filename