Make sed ask for confirmation before each replacement?

Question

Is there a way to make sed ask me for confirmation before each replace? Something similar to 'c' when using replace inside vim.

Does sed do this at all?

It would be technically possible but more of an intellectual exercise than a useful endeavor. See How to do a text replacement in a big folder hierarchy? which has Vim and Perl solutions.
I am using vim (args and argdo) whenever I need 'confirmation', but was wondering if there was a 'simpler' way

Kusalananda · Answer 1 · 2011-09-07 15:26:06Z

up vote 4 down vote

Doing it with sed would probably be possible but would require far too much thinking. It is easier to just do it with vim:

vim -c '%s/PATTERN/REPLACEMENT/gc' -c 'wq' file.in

answered Sep 7 '11 at 15:26

Kusalananda
1,26338

Kevin M · Answer 2 · 2011-10-07 18:30:42Z

up vote 2 down vote

You can get this by doing such:

:%s/OLD_TEXT/NEW_TEXT/gc

Specifically, adding the c after the third delimiter.

answered Oct 7 '11 at 18:30

Kevin M
1,0791412

2 Answers