Mac OS X Tiger in a Nutshell

Examples of Searching and Replacing

The examples in Table 6-10 show the metacharacters available to sed and vi. We have shown vi commands with an initial colon because that is how they are invoked with vi. A space is marked by a ▪; a tab is marked by tab.

Table 6-10. Searching and replacing

Command	Result
s/.*/( & )/	Redo the entire line, but add parentheses.
s/.*/mv & &.old/	Change a word list (one word per line) into mv commands.
/^$/d	Delete blank lines.
:g/^$/d	Same as previous, in vi editor.
/^[▪ tab]*$/d	Delete blank lines, plus lines containing only spaces or tabs.
:g/^[▪ tab]*$/d	Same as previous, in vi editor.
s/▪*/▪/g	Turn one or more spaces into one space.
:%s/▪*/▪/g	Same as previous, in ex editor.
:s/[0-9]/Item &:/	Turn a number into an item label (on the current line).
:s	Repeat the substitution on the first occurrence.
:&	Same as previous.
:sg	Same, but for all occurrences on the line.
:&g	Same as previous.
:%&g	Repeat the substitution globally (i.e., on all lines).
:.,$s/Fortran/\U&/g	On current line to last line, change word to uppercase.
:%s/.*/\L&/	Lowercase entire file.
:s/\<./\u&/g	Uppercase first letter of each word on current line (useful for titles).
:%s/yes/No/g	Globally change a word to No.
:%s/Yes/~/g	Globally change a different word to No (previous replacement).

Finally, here are some sed examples for transposing words. A simple transposition of two words might look like this:

s/die or do/do or die/                Transpose words ...