Sed notes

From raju

grep till the end of paragraph

On a Debian system, rc-alert prints the release critical bugs in the installed packages. Sample output looks

    % rc-alert
    Package: akonadi-server
    Bug:     804272
    Title:   fails to synchronize caldav to OpenXChange without notice
    Flags:   [      U ] (upstream)
    Dists:   [S] (stable)
    
    Package: akregator
    Bug:     836011
    Title:   akregator: Akregator keep crashing at exit, sometimes do not save recent feeds
    Flags:   [P+      ] (pending, patch)
    Dists:   [TU] (testing, unstable)
    
    Package: anacron
    Bug:     744753
    Title:   anacron: Anacron not triggered when system resumes under systemd
    Flags:   [ +H     ] (patch, help [wanted])
    Dists:   [STU] (stable, testing, unstable)
    
    Package: apt-xapian-index
    Bug:     793681
    ...
    

If we are only interested in RC bugs of a single package, it can be specified as an argument. For example

    % rc-alert synaptic    
    Package: src:synaptic
    Bug:     831268
    Title:   synaptic: FTBFS: cacheset.h:718:15: error: 'make_unsigned' in namespace 'std' does not name a template type
    Flags:   [        ] (none)
    Dists:   [TU] (testing, unstable)
    
    Package: synaptic
    Bug:     797271
    Title:   Synaptic false positive, does not launch
    Flags:   [        ] (none)
    Dists:   [T] (testing)
    
    Package: synaptic
    Bug:     811857
    Title:   synaptic: FTBFS with GCC 6: no matching function for call to
    Flags:   [        ] (none)
    Dists:   [TU] (testing, unstable)
    

The same can also be achieved by parsing the output of the original command such that it displays stanzas corresponding to synaptic package.

    % rc-alert | sed -n '/Package.*synaptic/,/^$/p'
    Package: src:synaptic
    Bug:     831268
    Title:   synaptic: FTBFS: cacheset.h:718:15: error: 'make_unsigned' in namespace 'std' does not name a template type
    Flags:   [        ] (none)
    Dists:   [TU] (testing, unstable)
    
    Package: synaptic
    Bug:     797271
    Title:   Synaptic false positive, does not launch
    Flags:   [        ] (none)
    Dists:   [T] (testing)
    
    Package: synaptic
    Bug:     811857
    Title:   synaptic: FTBFS with GCC 6: no matching function for call to
    Flags:   [        ] (none)
    Dists:   [TU] (testing, unstable)
    

Obviously "rc-alert synaptic" will be faster than parsing the output of "rc-alert". But I wanted to use this to demonstrate the capabilities of sed to parse up to the end of a paragraph.

    % time rc-alert | sed -n '/Package.*synaptic/,/^$/p' > /dev/null
    rc-alert  2.22s user 0.04s system 77% cpu 2.901 total
    sed -n '/Package.*synaptic/,/^$/p' > /dev/null  0.00s user 0.00s system 0% cpu 2.901 total
    
    % time rc-alert synaptic > /dev/null                            
    rc-alert synaptic > /dev/null  0.19s user 0.02s system 12% cpu 1.713 total
    

replace lines matching a pattern with blank lines

    sed -i -e 's/.*pattern.*//g' file.txt
    

To replace multiple patterns

    sed -i -e 's/.*pattern1.*\|.*pattern2.*//g' file.txt
    

remove lines matching a pattern

    sed -i -e '/pattern/d' file.txt
    

To remove lines matching multiple patterns

    sed -i -e '/pattern1\|pattern2/d' file.txt
    

remove window line endings

    sed -e 's/\x0d/\n/g' input.txt > output.txt
    

where '\x0d' is the hex code of '^M'. To find the hex code of a character in a file, open it in vim, press ga in normal mode. The hex code will be displayed in the status bar.


To do multiple replacements, chain them

    sed -e 's/\x00/\n/g' -e 's/\x0d/\n/g' input.txt > output.txt
    

remove comments with leading whitespace

    sed -e '/^[ \t]*#/d'
    

remove leading whitespace

    sed -e 's/^[[:space:]]*//'
    sed -e 's/^[ \t]*//'
    

To remove leading spaces

    sed -e 's/^ *//'