README.md

CLI text processing with GNU sed

Learn GNU sed with hundreds of examples and exercises. Visit https://youtu.be/nvKyKoeiZD8 for a short video about the book.

The book also includes exercises to test your understanding, which are presented together as a single file in this repo — Exercises.md.

For solutions to the exercises, see Exercise_solutions.md.

You can also use this interactive TUI app to practice some of the exercises from the book.

See Version_changes.md to keep track of changes made to the book.

E-book

• You can purchase the pdf/epub versions of the book using these links:
  • https://learnbyexample.gumroad.com/l/gnu_sed
  • https://leanpub.com/gnu_sed
• You can also get the book as part of these bundles:
  • All books bundle bundle from https://leanpub.com/b/learnbyexample-all-books or https://learnbyexample.gumroad.com/l/all-books
  • Linux CLI Text Processing bundle from https://leanpub.com/b/linux-cli-text-processing or https://learnbyexample.gumroad.com/l/linux-cli-text-processing
  • Magical one-liners bundle from https://leanpub.com/b/oneliners or https://learnbyexample.gumroad.com/l/oneliners
  • Awesome Regex bundle from https://leanpub.com/b/regex or https://learnbyexample.gumroad.com/l/regex
• See https://learnbyexample.github.io/books/ for a list of other books

For a preview of the book, see sample chapters.

The book can also be viewed as a single markdown file in this repo. See my blogpost on generating pdf/epub from markdown using pandoc if you are interested in the ebook creation process.

For the web version of the book, visit https://learnbyexample.github.io/learn_gnused/

Testimonials

Thank you for choosing to write and share your knowledge. I read your books on CLI and sed - I think they are very comprehensive and very well explained. Keep up the great work

— feedback on twitter

Feedback and Contributing

⚠️ ⚠️ Please DO NOT submit pull requests. Main reason being any modification requires changes in multiple places.

I would highly appreciate it if you'd let me know how you felt about this book. It could be anything from a simple thank you, pointing out a typo, mistakes in code snippets, which aspects of the book worked for you (or didn't!) and so on. Reader feedback is essential and especially so for self-published authors.

You can reach me via:

• Issue Manager: https://github.com/learnbyexample/learn_gnused/issues
• E-mail: echo 'bGVhcm5ieWV4YW1wbGUubmV0QGdtYWlsLmNvbQo=' | base64 --decode
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/learn_byexample

Table of Contents

1. Preface
2. Introduction
3. In-place file editing
4. Selective editing
5. BRE/ERE Regular Expressions
6. Flags
7. Shell substitutions
8. z, s and f command line options
9. append, change, insert
10. Adding content from file
11. Control structures
12. Processing lines bounded by distinct markers
13. Gotchas and Tricks
14. Further Reading

Acknowledgements

• GNU sed documentation — manual and examples
• stackoverflow and unix.stackexchange — for getting answers to pertinent questions on sed and related commands
• tex.stackexchange — for help on pandoc and tex related questions
• /r/commandline/, /r/linux4noobs/, /r/linuxquestions/ and /r/linux/ — helpful forums
• canva — cover image
• oxipng, pngquant and svgcleaner — optimizing images
• Warning and Info icons by Amada44 under public domain
• arifmahmudrana for spotting an ambiguous explanation
• mdBook — for web version of the book
  • mdBook-pagetoc — for adding table of contents for each chapter
  • minify-html — for minifying html files

Special thanks to all my friends and online acquaintances for their help, support and encouragement, especially during difficult times.

License

The book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

The code snippets are licensed under MIT, see LICENSE file.