print only changed line with sed after double substition
 

Hi,

As the title says, I'm trying to print only the lines that have been changed with sed after a double substitution.
This is the text file:
Normally I know that I need to use the -n option with the p flag, but in this case I'm trying to print only the lines that were altered by both substitions. The two substitions are 's/down/DOWN/' and 's/up/UP/'.
So for instance, sed -e '/s/up/UP' -e 's/down/DOWN' file.txt will display the whole file, including the lines which haven't been altered.

sed -n -e 's/up/UP/p' -e 's/down/DOWN/p' file.txt won't work either, because lines containing both 'up' and 'down' are going to be displayed twice (once for each substition).

So how should I go about this problem?

Use regex to do the substitution for both in one stanza.

I can only think of the\U option, which turns what it matches into uppercase. I don't want the solution, but I'd like to know in principle how I could actually use regex for two different strings and apply the same action to both. I was thinking of something like 's/"up|down"/\U/', which doesn't work because it interprets them literally. And neither would \| work between "up" and "down" :)

You probably need to clarify the problem a little more. You can do a lot with t, b, and : alone. The t will branch if s/up/&/; succeeds, though in effect it is just a check.

If you are only ever going to be using GNU sed then you can do it more concisely with T instead and skip the jumping.

Perhaps you shouldn't be so keen to reject options. You might be pleasantly surprised.

Some tips if I might:
- look at "-r"
- check the (GNU) doco for the first few sentences describing the "s" command. Particularly re the matched portion of the pattern space.

(no need for branching in this case)

I'm not rejecting options. After all -n and -e are options. It's just that you suggested using regex and still don't know exactly how I could solve the problem through regex alone. Yes, actually, I've already looked at -r, and sed does interpret | as or, but that doesn't seem to be the right solution. Anyway, I haven't heard of t, b, or :, so I'll have to read a little bit more.

Think like this...

...using the hints provided by syg00. It works.

I had to use the ADDRESS to get only the desired line(s), then using the not so subtle 's' hint provided by syg00 and a previously mentioned operator provided the right result.

Not to give everything away, here is an obfuscated example with the text in ud.txt:

Perhaps syg00 has seen a way to get it without the address...?

With the t and d commands
With awk
If you want to replace multiple ups and downs per line then you need the g modifier in sed or gsub in awk.

This is the approach that will encourage contributions. You are making the effort, I am happy to help. If you eventually feel lost, ask and I will supply my solution. It may not be correct, or sufficient, but hopefully we may all learn something by the exercise.

This is what I came up with:
The problem is that "U" is interpreted as literal "U", and it doesn't convert to uppercase letters. How do I make sed interpret it correctly?

By the way, I think the correct option was -E, not -r, in order to make sed interpret extended regex. I was referring to -E when I said that sed was eventually interpreting | as "or".

You'll probably use an ampersand & instead of \U

Here's another alternative:

Though neither example do much with regex, more with sed programming.

The t is a conditional jump. When used without a destination it defaults to a jump to the end of the sed script.
Thus if the // pattern matches AND the s/// substitution succeeds, hop over the command to delete the line.

I don't insist doing it with regex (only). syg00 had suggested it at the beginning of the thread and that's why I was curious. I'm fine with using sed options. The question is, why doesn't \U work? I've seen several examples on the internet.

P.S. Only now did I see that on mac it works only with -E (for extended regex), but on Centos it seems to be working with -r (only?).

In which context have you seen \U mentioned? I don't see it in the regex manual or in the manual for sed itself.

Though \U does have a meaning in perl's pattern matching

https://www.gnu.org/software/sed/man...s_0022-Command

And yes, I was working with sed on mac, and now I see it's behaving slightly differently on Centos 7 when using \U. It doesn't interpret it as a literal \U, but it still doesn't work. It simply deletes both matches ("up" and "down").

If you want portability you'll need to give up on \U in sed scripting and stay closer to POSIX.