LinuxQuestions.org - [SOLVED] How do you use sed to edit a file?

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How do you use sed to edit a file?

I need to change one word in over a thousand pages of HTML. I think sed is the only way to do this, but I've never used sed before.

After reading the documentation, I see that it is pretty easy to alter files to standard output, in other words, the screen.

But I don't want to do just alter text to the screen, I want to alter the original file, else I am not doing any Stream EDiting as near as I can tell.

None of the documentation explains how to take a file, apply sed to alter that file. How do you do this?

I'm pretty clear on the basics,

Code:

[myuser@myhost dir]#sed s/changethis/tothis/ /mydir/myfile

How do I apply sed to actually make the changes to myfile?

Code:

sed s/changethis/tothis/ /mydir/myfile > /tmp/newfile

mv /tmp/newfile /mydir/myfile

Or use sed's --in-place option, from the man page:

Code:

      -i[SUFFIX], --in-place[=SUFFIX]



              edit files in place (makes backup if extension supplied)

Thanks AlucardZero, -i did the trick. Perl from the command line has a similar feature. My "Linux in a Nutshell" is a ten year old edition. Time to upgrade.

Why would I want to use the redirection and mv command? Did you imagine I might have a really old Linux distribution?

It's just another way to do things.