Comments on: Using different delimiters in sed

By: Me

Me — Wed, 26 Dec 2018 22:09:44 +0000

I’ve often used this feature of sed for search/replace lists with my colleagues... I just tell them to create me a spreadsheet with “find” string in first cell and replace in second... then export to text... a little recursive sed script using either spaces or commas as delimiter/separator is magic to them.....

By: waldner

waldner — Wed, 26 Aug 2015 10:28:59 +0000

In reply to John. It just has to be escaped, as explained in the article and in the sed docs.

sed '\_this_d' test
etc.

By: John

John — Thu, 30 Jul 2015 12:50:24 +0000

Note that this does not work when the sed expression begins with the delimiter, such as the 'delete' case or 'change only lines that have this text' case:

$ cat test
this
that
this
orthat
orthis
$
$ sed '/this/d' test
that
orthat
$
$ sed '_this_d' test
sed: -e expression #1, char 1: unknown command: `_'
$
$ sed '/this/s/^/added/g' test
addedthis
that
addedthis
orthat
addedorthis
$
$ sed '?this?s?^?added?g' test
sed: -e expression #1, char 1: unknown command: `?'
$

By: Berserk9779

Berserk9779 — Wed, 02 Jul 2014 18:15:00 +0000

Not any character will do, only single byte ones:

sed -i 'sñasdñfghñg' tt
sed: -e expression #1, char 2: delimiter character is not a single-byte character

By: Johan Hedberg

Johan Hedberg — Tue, 17 Jun 2014 14:46:15 +0000

In reply to waldner. Did a test on Solaris and on Sun sed the backslash doesn't work. However with GNU sed it works. So for compability one shouldn't use backslash.

root@solaris11:~# echo abc | sed 's\b\B\'
abc
root@solaris11:~# echo abc | gsed 's\b\B\'
aBc