use sed to replace a line

Question

I have been struggling to do this. I need to replace a line in a document with either blank space or the word "DELETED." The lines are different, and I am running a counter to determine the correct line to replace. So far, I have been using:

sed -ie ''$NUMLINE's/^$/DELETED/' Brown_Adam_CIVForms.txt

I would like to replace the NUMLINE-th line from this document (whatever it may be) and replace it with either blank space or the word "DELETED." Please help!!

Thank you!!!

mouviciel · Accepted Answer · 2011-04-11 07:33:51Z

4

Just insert .* between ^ and $. Like:

sed -ie $NUMLINE's/^.*$/DELETED/' Brown_Adam_CIVForms.txt

answered Apr 11, 2011 at 7:33

mouviciel

68k12 gold badges108 silver badges144 bronze badges

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

2 Comments

Dave Over a year ago

This was awesome. Worked perfectly. Thanks! Any advice for only changing the line if the previous line is not "--"? THANKS!!!

mouviciel Over a year ago

Whenever I need to work on more than one line, I switch from sed to awk or perl.

kurumi · Accepted Answer · 2011-04-11 08:07:32Z

0

you can also use awk

awk -vnum=$NUMLINE 'NR==num{$0="DELETED"}1' file

answered Apr 11, 2011 at 8:07

kurumi

25.7k5 gold badges47 silver badges52 bronze badges

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

use sed to replace a line

2 Answers 2

2 Comments

Comments

Linked

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

2 Answers 2

2 Comments

Comments

Linked

Related