Use sed to "replace all occurrences" about the-art-of-command-line HOT 3 OPEN

I think it would be better to use sed to keep it more consistent with the previous paragraph

Know basic awk and sed for simple data munging. For example, summing all numbers in the third column of a text file: awk '{ x += $3 } END { print x }'. This is probably 3X faster and 3X shorter than equivalent Python.

from the-art-of-command-line.

I was going to make the same recommendation for sed -i 's/old-string/new-string/g' my-files-*.txt, and agree it's consistent with the awk/sed paragraph.

from the-art-of-command-line.

One reason to prefer perl is that sed doesn't by default support full regular expressions (not needed in this example, but inevitably required in some cases) unless you use the -r option. And this option also varies by platform, so doesn't exist on MacOS. Perl is similar across platforms. So even though I avoid perl in most situations, it arguably is preferable in this narrow use case.

Of course, in practice I tend now to use my own https://github.com/jlevy/repren as I'm tired of remembering these details. (It's the best I know of for flexibility but would be interested to hear of others.)

This reminds me we should include a good capturing groups example. I've added this as #115.

from the-art-of-command-line.