Question

Basically there a few lines which contain a common format, but different wording at the end. The command will work for all of them, but I want to match all possible pattern, thereby needing only 1 line in the script. As an example, I know how to make the script work like so:

/pattern1/ s/asdf/ghjk/g
/pattern2/ s/asdf/ghjk/g
/pattern3/ s/asdf/ghjk/g

Any ideas?

Answer 1

If your patterns are really as similar as in your example, you can use

sed -e '/pattern[1-3]/ s/asdf/ghjk/g'

If the patterns aren’t so similar and your sed command supports extended regular expressions, you can use

sed -E -e '/(pattern1|pattern2|pattern3)/ s/asdf/ghjk/g'
#   ^^ use extended regular expressions
#      for GNU sed, use -r or escape (, |, and ) with \

If your sed command doesn’t support extended regular expressions, you might have to turn to awk or perl:

perl -ple '/(pattern1|pattern2|pattern3)/ && s/asdf/ghjk/g'