Learn Linux Shell Scripting - Fundamentals of Bash 4.4

Line manipulation

While the word manipulation functionality of sed is great, it also allows us to manipulate whole lines. For example, we can delete certain lines, by number:

reader@ubuntu:~/scripts/chapter_10$ echo -e "Hi,\nthis is \nPatrick"Hi,this is Patrickreader@ubuntu:~/scripts/chapter_10$ echo -e "Hi,\nthis is \nPatrick" | sed 'd'reader@ubuntu:~/scripts/chapter_10$ echo -e "Hi,\nthis is \nPatrick" | sed '1d'this is Patrick

By using echo -e combined with the newline character (\n), we can create multi-line statements. -e is explained on the man echo page as enable interpretation of backslash escapes. By piping this multi-line output into sed, we can use the delete functionality, which is a script that simply uses the character d.