How to find and replace using sed text containing a star *

Question

I would like to find and replace text within many .procmailrc files, and using grep and sed.

I would like to remove the following line (including the new line break at the beginning) from the .procmailrc files:

* !^FROM_MAILER

The full contents of the file I want changed from:

:0
* !^FROM_MAILER
! [email protected]

to:

:0
! [email protected]

The command I am running is:

grep -lir '\n* !^FROM_MAILER' .procmailrc | xargs sed -i 's/\n* !^FROM_MAILER//g'

But it is not replacing the *. In leaves the line in with just the * on it. If I escape the * as follows, that also does not work:

grep -lir '\n\* !^FROM_MAILER' .procmailrc | xargs sed -i 's/\n\* !^FROM_MAILER//g'

So I trying to find out how to do the find and replace to remove the entire line with the * in it.

Answer 1

With sed alone:

sed -i '/^* !^FROM_MAILER$/d' file

To remove the whole line containing the exact string * !^FROM_MAILER, with nothing before and after that string. The d command deletes the line.

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Edit: If you want to do the replace in all files recusively, use the following:

find /path -type f -exec sed -i '/^* !^FROM_MAILER$/d' {} +