Case-insensitive search with sed

Question

I have a file like this:

This     is    my work
This is my work
This is     my    WORK

I want to search all patterns irrespective of spaces and upper/lower cases. How can I do this using sed?

"search all patterns" - What patterns do you have? Maybe an example would help. — oberlies, May 14 '14 at 10:46

score 2 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 10:29

You do not need sed for this. grep with ignore case and the quantifier * on each space is more than sufficient.

grep -i 'This *is *my *work' Input.txt

If you insist on sed, you can use this crazy hack from this answer, as shown below.

sed  's/This *is *my *work/&/I;tx;d;:x' Input.txt

You can also use the following variation of jkyako's answer.

sed -n '/This *is *my *work/Ip' Input.txt

Note that if you do not want to match lines that simply contain the pattern, but only lines that match the pattern, you will have to anchor your pattern with ^ and $.

sed -n '/^This *is *my *work/Ip$' Input1.txt

John C · Answer 2 · 2014-05-14T07:19:33.670

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Sorry I didn't allow for spaces in my original answer. This should solve that problem.

grep -i "this\s*is\s*my\s*work" file

edited May 14 '14 at 07:19

answered May 14 '14 at 05:35

John C

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...which is why I'd recommend using grep and not sed for this :) – jkyako May 14 '14 at 05:37

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered May 14 '14 at 05:36

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Specifically using sed you could try the following, perhaps there's a shorter way:

sed -n '/[Tt][Hh][Ii][Ss] *[Ii][Ss] *[Mm][Yy] *[Ww][Oo][Rr][Kk]/p'

answered May 14 '14 at 05:36

jkyako

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Case-insensitive search with sed

3 Answers3