Sed Oneliners
February 9th, 2011
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“sed” stands for Stream EDitor. Sed is a non-interactive editor, written by the late Lee E. McMahon in 1973 or 1974. A brief history of sed’s origins may be found in an early history of the Unix tools, at.
Instead of altering a file interactively by moving the cursor on the screen (as with a word processor), the user sends a script of editing instructions to sed, plus the name of the file to edit (or the text to be edited may come as output from a pipe). In this sense, sed works like a filter — deleting, inserting and changing characters, words, and lines of text. Its range of activity goes from small, simple changes to very complex ones.