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Can we use variable in sed command?

Author

Victoria Simmons

Updated on June 12, 2026

Can we use variable in sed command?

Use double quotes so that the shell would expand variables. Use a separator different than / since the replacement contains /

What does sed ‘/ $/ D do?

2 Answers. It means that sed will read the next line and start processing it. nothing will be printed other than the blank lines, three times each. The command d is only applied to empty lines here: ‘/^$/d;p;p’.

How do you use special character in sed?

The special character in sed are the same as those in grep, with one key difference: the forward slash / is a special character in sed. The reason for this will become very clear when studying sed commands.

What is S+ in sed?

The command sed ‘s/\s\s*/ /g’ replaces one or more consecutive space/tab with a single space, and then repeats the substitution until no more matches are made on the current line.

What is S in shell script?

-S filename ] can be read as “not is-socket filename”. So the command is checking whether a “socket” (a special kind of file) exists with each name in the loop. The script uses this command as the argument to an if statement (which can take any command, not just [ ) and sets DOWN to true if any of them does not exist.

How do you replace variables in sed?

Environment variable substitution using Sed

  1. s is used to replace the found expression INSTHOME with $HOME.
  2. g stands for “global”, which means to do this find & replace for the whole line.
  3. -i is used to edit in place on filename.
  4. -e is to indicate the expression/command to run.

How do you expand a variable in sed?

Just use double quotes instead of single quotes. You’ll also need to use {} to delimit the number_line variable correctly and escape the \ , too. Change single quotes to double quotes: Enclosing characters in single quotes preserves the literal value of each character within the quotes.

How do you escape in sed?

In a nutshell, for sed ‘s/…/…/’ :

  1. Write the regex between single quotes.
  2. Use ‘\” to end up with a single quote in the regex.
  3. Put a backslash before $.
  4. Inside a bracket expression, for – to be treated literally, make sure it is first or last ( [abc-] or [-abc] , not [a-bc] ).

How do you replace sed?

Find and replace text within a file using sed command

  1. Use Stream EDitor (sed) as follows:
  2. sed -i ‘s/old-text/new-text/g’ input.
  3. The s is the substitute command of sed for find and replace.
  4. It tells sed to find all occurrences of ‘old-text’ and replace with ‘new-text’ in a file named input.

What characters do I need to escape in sed?

Sed needs many characters to be escaped to get their special meaning. For example, if you escape a digit in the replacement string, it will turn in to a backreference. Remember, if you use a character other than / as delimiter, you need replace the slash in the expressions above wih the character you are using.