OSDC - The Open Source Developers' Club

The man page:
A stream editor is used to perform text transformations on an input stream...

The reality:
sed is much, much more powerful utility than you've been lead to believe.

If your typical conception of sed is:

    sed 's/this/that/' some_file

then you may be interested to see what this arcane tool can really get up to. For instance:

• To commify numbers in a file:

      sed ':a;s/\B[0-9]\{3\}\>/,&/;ta'
  

• Print paragraphs in a file that match the regex 'regex':

      sed '/./{H;$!d;};x;/regex/!d'
  

• And so much more.

The talk will demonstrate a variety of uses for this tool and make the case for adding sed to your tool box regardless of which Open Source scripting language you already use.

We'll also look at:

• dc.sed - an arbitrary precision RPN calculator
• sed.hanoi - Solve Towers of Hanoi
• sql.sed - a SQL interpreter

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