Line Editors in Linux, Tips and Tricks

January 15, 2025 · View on GitHub

I will log various ways through which tools like sed, cut and tr can be used.

`sed` 😥

Print specific lines from a file using line numbers.

# print lines 12 to 22
sed -n '12,22p' file.txt

Omit first line of output.
```
sed -n '1!p'
```
Omit last line of file.
```
sed '$d' file.txt
```
Print everything after a pattern (inclusive).
```
sed -n '/pattern/,$ p' file.txt
```
Print everything before a pattern (inclusive).
```
sed -n '1,/pattern/ p' file.txt
```
Print everything between two patterns
```
sed -nE '/^foo/,/^bar/p' file.txt
```
Avoid printing the searched pattern
```
sed -n 's/^my_string//p' file.md
```
Insert contents of file after a certain line
```
sed '5 r newfile.txt' file.txt
```

Change line containing regex/pattern match

sed '/MATCH THIS/c\REPLACE WITH THIS' file.txt

Translate (or convert) all () to [] in a text file.
```
tr '()' '[]'
```
Translate all occurrences of multiple spaces with a single space.
```
tr -s ' '
```

Remove unwanted characters from string.

# will delete % and ;
echo "1;00%" | tr -d "%;"

Print every 4th word (or field) from a space separated STDIN.
```
cut -d' ' -f4
```
I don't know about you but this is pretty cool.