use sed to replace a line

Question

I have been struggling to do this. I need to replace a line in a document with either blank space or the word "DELETED." The lines are different, and I am running a counter to determine the correct line to replace. So far, I have been using:

sed -ie ''$NUMLINE's/^$/DELETED/' Brown_Adam_CIVForms.txt

I would like to replace the NUMLINE-th line from this document (whatever it may be) and replace it with either blank space or the word "DELETED." Please help!!

Thank you!!!

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 11 '11 at 07:33

4

Just insert .* between ^ and $. Like:

sed -ie $NUMLINE's/^.*$/DELETED/' Brown_Adam_CIVForms.txt

answered Apr 11 '11 at 07:33

mouviciel

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This was awesome. Worked perfectly. Thanks! Any advice for only changing the line if the previous line is not "--"? THANKS!!! – Dave Apr 11 '11 at 07:34
1

Whenever I need to work on more than one line, I switch from `sed` to `awk` or `perl`. – mouviciel Apr 11 '11 at 07:37

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 11 '11 at 08:07

0

you can also use awk

awk -vnum=$NUMLINE 'NR==num{$0="DELETED"}1' file

answered Apr 11 '11 at 08:07

kurumi

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use sed to replace a line

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