Question

How can I replace ; with ;\n (semicolon followed by a newline) in sed?

I’ve tried building off of

sed s/;/\\n/g file

and

sed -e '/;/G' file

but I can’t get either to work

Answer 1

You need to cheat a bit: in bash you can say

sed $'s/;/;\\\n/g'

or, portably (POSIX):

sed "s/;/;$(printf '\\\n')/g"

sed does not portably/reliably handle backslash-escapes anywhere but in the pattern, and even there it’s limited (POSIX only requires that \n be handled, not \t or the others). Note that you also need a backslash before the \n so sed doesn’t read it as the end of the command.