How to on one line sed commands?

[blackrhino]

We have our sample data_file with file contents as follows: Refer to this file to see the original contents.

hamster, furry little creature, 2 hamster drive
donkey, back breaking helper, 8 donkey jacket road
horse,  top racer, 12 Horse throat Lane
badger,  night rider, 15 Badger Close 
cow,  loves eating grass all day, 16 Moofield Aveune
bull,  these horns need shapening, 16 Moofield Aveune
sheep, can you take this coat off, 6 Wool road

As good practice in a live environment work on copies of files, make sure the output is how you want first.

Oneliners

Delete all the contents, remember sed does not made edits on the file itself, so the original contents will still be there, this is probably not something you will be doing, but to demonstrate sed's delete command "d". There is no output, but your original file remains unchanged.

$ sed 'd' data_file

Delete the first line of a file.

$ sed '1d' data_file 
donkey, back breaking helper, 8 donkey jacket road
horse,  top racer, 12 Horse throat Lane
badger,  night rider, 15 Badger Close 
cow,  loves eating grass all day, 16 Moofield Aveune
bull,  these horns need shapening, 16 Moofield Aveune
sheep, can you take this coat off, 6 Wool road

Delete the last line in a file.

$ sed '$d' data_file 
hamster, furry little creature, 2 hamster drive
donkey, back breaking helper, 8 donkey jacket road
horse,  top racer, 12 Horse throat Lane
badger,  night rider, 15 Badger Close 
cow,  loves eating grass all day, 16 Moofield Aveune
bull,  these horns need shapening, 16 Moofield Aveune

Delete only blank lines in a file. Prints the file as is, because no blank lines are in the file, you can add your own blank lines to verify this.

$ sed '/^$/d' data_file 
hamster, furry little creature, 2 hamster drive
donkey, back breaking helper, 8 donkey jacket road
horse,  top racer, 12 Horse throat Lane
badger,  night rider, 15 Badger Close 
cow,  loves eating grass all day, 16 Moofield Aveune
bull,  these horns need shapening, 16 Moofield Aveune
sheep, can you take this coat off, 6 Wool road

Delete range of lines in file, by using an address of matching words.

$ sed '/horse/,/badger/d' data_file 
hamster, furry little creature, 2 hamster drive
donkey, back breaking helper, 8 donkey jacket road
cow,  loves eating grass all day, 16 Moofield Aveune
bull,  these horns need shapening, 16 Moofield Aveune
sheep, can you take this coat off, 6 Wool road

Delete lines 3 through 6 in the file.

$ sed '3,6d' data_file 
hamster, furry little creature, 2 hamster drive
donkey, back breaking helper, 8 donkey jacket road
sheep, can you take this coat off, 6 Wool road

Delete line 1 through the first blank line. I have inserted a blank line for demonstration purposes between, badger and cow. Note that if your file has no blank lines and you run this command it removes all the lines, not literally because sed does not edit the original file, but does shows you the output after the changes.

$ sed '1,/^$/d' data_file 
cow,  loves eating grass all day, 16 Moofield Aveune
bull,  these horns need shapening, 16 Moofield Aveune
sheep, can you take this coat off, 6 Wool road

Delete the inverse of the matching address using an exclamation mark.
First a normal address delete.

$ sed '3,6d' data_file 
hamster, furry little creature, 2 hamster drive
donkey, back breaking helper, 8 donkey jacket road
sheep, can you take this coat off, 6 Wool road

Then a inverse, delete everything but line 3 through 6.

$ sed '3,6!d' data_file 
horse,  top racer, 12 Horse throat Lane
badger,  night rider, 15 Badger Close 
cow,  loves eating grass all day, 16 Moofield Aveune
bull,  these horns need shapening, 16 Moofield Aveune

Substitute a tab with another string. The tab file looks like this:

hamsterparty	donkeyparty	horseparty	badgerparty

Replace the 3rd tab with three dashes.

$ sed 's/\t/ --- /3' tabfile 
hamsterparty	donkeyparty	horseparty --- badgerparty