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There is an example in this link about sed:

To delete the first number on all lines that start with a "#" use:

sed '/^#/ s/[0-9][0-9]*//'

What is the benefit of first pattern(/^#/)? It could be simply:

sed 's/^#[0-9][0-9]*//'
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I don't get the [0-9][0-9]* why not [0-9]\+? – Bernhard Apr 18 '12 at 6:39
@Bernhard One good reason is maximum portability. I don't think \+ is guaranteed by POSIX. – jw013 Apr 18 '12 at 7:22
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@Barnhard I just copied it from the link. But this wikipedia article says that \+ is in POSIX extended regular expressions. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression#Syntax – Majid Azimi Apr 18 '12 at 7:54
POSIX sed uses BRE's though. – jw013 Apr 18 '12 at 8:50
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Every modern implementation of sed I've encountered has the ability to use EREs (sometimes with flag -r, other times with flag -E), and there is talk of adding this capacity to the POSIX standard for sed. @jw013 is correct though that the current POSIX standard doesn't require sed to handle anything other than BREs. EREs handle plain +; some sed implementations enhance their BREs to also handle \+, but if I remember rightly, this is not part of POSIX. Instead of p\+ you could use p\{1,\}, which is a POSIX BRE. – dubiousjim Oct 16 '12 at 15:51

2 Answers

up vote 5 down vote accepted

The general format of sed commands is

[address[,address]] function

When a command has a single address, it operates on all lines that match that address. When a command has no address, it operates on every single line.

Reference: POSIX sed

Regarding your specific examples:

  • /^#/ s/[0-9][0-9]*//

    • This command has an address, /^#/, which matches all lines beginning with a #.

    • The substitution pattern is /[0-9][0-9]*/. This matches the first sequence of digits wherever it occurs in the line.

    • Plain English summary: delete the first sequence of digits in every line beginning with a #.

    • Example: # non-digits|5555|non-digits|5555 becomes # non-digits||non-digits|5555

  • s/^#[0-9][0-9]*//

    • There is no address, so this command operates on every single line.

    • The substitution pattern, /^#[0-9][0-9]*/, matches a sequence of consecutive digits preceded by a # anchored at the beginning of the line.

    • Plain English summary: delete # followed by a sequence of digits (and only that pattern) from the beginning of every line.

    • Example: #5555|non-digits|5555 becomes |non-digits|5555, but # non-digits|5555|non-digits|5555 is unchanged because the substitution pattern does not match.

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up vote 2 down vote

The first will match and substitute:

#abc99

The second will not.

Plus, the second will also remove the initial #.

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