How do you create a Bash Script for replacing text in a document, utilizing regular expressions?

Question

Identical to this question:

Find and replace text within a file using commands

However I want an answer that utilizes regular expressions specifically. So in short:

Using commandline; what command can I used to search and replace text in a commandline while utilizing regular expressions?

For example:

search file.txt "([a-z]+)" "\1 blah"

http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/trusty/en/man1/sed.1.html — glenn jackman, Nov 28 '14 at 14:12

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 28 '14 at 14:10

3

Seems like you want something like this,

$ cat file
foo bar
$ sed 's/\([a-z]\+\)/\1 blah/g' file
foo blah bar blah

\([a-z]\+\) captures one or more lowercase letters. Then the matched characters are replaced by the characters which are present inside the group index 1 plus the string " blah".

answered Nov 28 '14 at 14:10

Avinash Raj

78,556

And this is case sensitive? – Anon Nov 28 '14 at 14:15
2

to do a case insensitive match sed 's/\([a-zA-Z]\+\)/\1 blah/g' file or sed 's/\([a-z]\+\)/\1 blah/gi' file – Avinash Raj Nov 28 '14 at 14:16

How do you create a Bash Script for replacing text in a document, utilizing regular expressions?

1 Answers1