The sed command¶

sed is a stream editor, and it can be used to edit text files, with its most common use being to replace occurrences of words in a files. This is extremely helpful in situations where a configuration file has a lot of instances of the same word that needs replacing throughout the file.

For example if you were to copy a configuration to use for a new site and wanted to replace all instances of the original domain with the new domain then you could use this command. The example below replaces all instances of ukfast.co.uk with ukfast.net and

sed 's/ukfast.co.uk/ukfast.net/g' ukfast.co.uk.conf > ukfast.net.conf