CODEWITHSUNDEEP
sed
pseudosudo
pseudosudo

Reputation: 1980

replace ';' with ';\n'

How can I replace ; with ;\n (semicolon followed by a newline) in sed?

I've tried building off of 

sed s/;/\\n/g file

and

sed -e '/;/G' file

but I can't get either to work

Upvotes: 4

Views: 980

Answers (2)

geekosaur
geekosaur

Reputation: 61449

You need to cheat a bit: in bash you can say

sed $'s/;/;\\\n/g'

or, portably (POSIX):

sed "s/;/;$(printf '\\\n')/g"

sed does not portably/reliably handle backslash-escapes anywhere but in the pattern, and even there it's limited (POSIX only requires that \n be handled, not \t or the others). Note that you also need a backslash before the \n so sed doesn't read it as the end of the command.

Upvotes: 4

Rich Adams
Rich Adams

Reputation: 26574

sed -ie 's/;/;\n/g' <file>

That's assuming you want to do it inline in the file, remove the "i" and just use "-e" if that's not the case.

Upvotes: 1

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