GNU SED

Example based guide to mastering GNU sed.

The book also includes exercises to test your understanding, which is presented together as a single file in this repo — Exercises.md

For solutions to the exercises, see Exercise_solutions.md.

See Version_changes.md to keep track of changes made to the book.

E-book

You can purchase the pdf/epub versions of the book using these links:

• https://learnbyexample.gumroad.com/l/gnu_sed
• https://leanpub.com/gnu_sed

You can also get the book as part of these bundles:

• Magical one-liners bundle from https://learnbyexample.gumroad.com/l/oneliners or https://leanpub.com/b/oneliners
• Awesome Regex bundle from https://learnbyexample.gumroad.com/l/regex or https://leanpub.com/b/regex
• All books bundle bundle from https://learnbyexample.gumroad.com/l/all-books
  • Includes all my programming books

See https://learnbyexample.github.io/books/ for list of other books

For a preview of the book, see sample chapters

The book can also be viewed as a single markdown file in this repo. See my blogpost on generating pdf from markdown using pandoc if you are interested in the ebook creation process.

For web version of the book, visit https://learnbyexample.github.io/learn_gnused/

Feedback

Open an issue if you spot any typo/errors.

⚠️ ⚠️ Please DO NOT submit pull requests. Main reason being any modification requires changes in multiple places.

I'd also highly appreciate your feedback about the book.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/learn_byexample

Table of Contents

1. Preface
2. Introduction
3. In-place file editing
4. Selective editing
5. BRE/ERE Regular Expressions
6. Flags
7. Shell substitutions
8. z, s and f command line options
9. append, change, insert
10. Adding content from file
11. Control structures
12. Processing lines bounded by distinct markers
13. Gotchas and Tricks
14. Further Reading

Acknowledgements

• GNU sed documentation — manual and examples
• stackoverflow and unix.stackexchange — for getting answers to pertinent questions on bash, sed and other commands
• tex.stackexchange — for help on pandoc and tex related questions
• LibreOffice Draw — cover image
• pngquant and svgcleaner for optimizing images
• softwareengineering.stackexchange and skolakoda for programming quotes
• Warning and Info icons by Amada44 under public domain
• arifmahmudrana for spotting an ambiguous explanation
• mdBook — for web version of the book
  • mdBook-pagetoc — for adding table of contents for each chapter
  • minify-html — for minifying html files

Special thanks to all my friends and online acquaintances for their help, support and encouragement, especially during difficult times.

License

The book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

The code snippets are licensed under MIT, see LICENSE file