Useful when you want to append the contents of a whole file into something you are sed'ing. Be careful if you use -i, it will replace the working file.

sed -i "/attr_accessor :config/r ../patch_for_application.rb.tmpl" app/controllers/application.rb

First download http://sed.sourceforge.net/grabbag/scripts/list_urls.sed.

Make the script executable with chmod:

chmod +x list_urls.sed

Now pipe the HTML to the script:

cat your.html | list_urls.sed

The output will be all URLs it finds...

More Sed scripts and documentation can be found here

This will remove the users tag and everything in between the users tag:

sed -i .bak '/<users type="array">/,/<\/users>/d' users.xml

A backup will be created named users.xml.bak.

If you want to select only specific tags use this:

sed -n -e '/<private-parts>/,/<\/private-parts>/p' e users.xml

For more advanced XML processing use: * XMLStarlet * xml-coreutiles * xml2/2xml * Your imagination.

Replace control character ^A with tab character:

sed -e "s/$(echo -e \\001)/\\echo -e '\t'/g" file.txt

See Wikipedia for list of control characters.

Search and replace XXX with YYY in all files:

perl -e "s/XXX/YYY/g;" -pi $(find . -type f)

Troubleshooting

If you get this error:

zsh: argument list too long: perl

Your argument list is clearly too long. Try this instead, or use xargs:

find . \
   -type f \
   -exec perl -i -pe's/XXX/YYY/g' {} +

Search and Replace with Sed

Using sed is more complicated, but this should at least work on Linux:

# Find, backup and replace
find . -name "*.rb" -print | xargs sed -i.bak 's/XXX/YYY/g'
# Delete backup files
find . -name '*.bak' -type f -delete

Reference.

Also see: https://snippets.aktagon.com/snippets/861-search-and-replace-file-contents-and-file-names