Sed Regular Expressions

Internal

• sed

Special Characters (need to be escaped in regular expressions)

     /
     "
     $ # unescaped signifies end of line 
     !
     [
     ]

Non-Special Characters (do not need to be escaped in regular expressions)

     <
     >
     (
     )
     !
     -

Grouping

Use \( and \) for grouping. Parentheses must be escaped to be interpreted as grouping separator.

Examples

Match everything except space:

     [^ ]*

     .*

seems to work too.

Words (digits, alpha, _):

sed -e 's/[0-9a-zA-Z_]*/THIS_WAS_A_WORD/g'

Blank spaces (spaces, tabs, newlines): \s does not seem to work.