Wed, 08 Feb 2006
Learning sed(1)
Few days ago I got some free time, which I decided to spend by reading the sed(1) documentation. I have used sed for tasks like s/Bill/Linus/g before, and I vaguely knew it can do something more.
Well, it turned out that the sed language is not very complicated, yet it is more powerful than I expected. It can group commands to blocks, and it can do both conditional and unconditional branches. With these constructs, the language can become powerful enough to emulate a Turing machine.
Just for fun I wrote a simple sed script which works as a context grep(1) -- i.e. it prints some context as well as the matched line (in this case, two lines above and two lines below). It has some bugs (it does not work as expected when the searched string is on two consecutive lines, for example).
#!/bin/sed -nf
# Context grep - sample script written by Jan "Yenya" Kasprzak
# The sample searched string is "gopher" here
H;x;s/.*\n\([^\n]*\n[^\n]*\n[^\n]*\)$/\1/;x# Keep the last three lines in buffer
/gopher/{x;p;x;n;N;p# If found, print the buffer, the next two lines,
# and an empty line
a
}
It can be tested with the following commands:
$ chmod +x ./agrep.sed $ ./agrep.sed /etc/passwd
For things like this, Perl or AWK would probably be a better tool, but nevertheless, using sed for something beyond the classical s/Bill/Linus/g task can be a nice mental exercise. Hmm, sed golf, anyone?