Question

I am using sed -e 's/\(.*\)ABC/\1DEF/' myfile to replace the last occurrence of ABC with DEF in a file.

I want to modify it to replace the last occurrence of ABC with DEF in each line in the file.

Is it possible to do with regex ?

Thanks

Answer 1

You need to add ‘g’ to the end of your sed:

sed -e 's/\(.*\)ABC/\1DEF/g'

This tells sed to replace every occurrence of your regex (“globally”) instead of only the first occurrence.

EDIT: You should also add a $, if you want to ensure that it is replacing the last occurrence of ABC on the line:

sed -e 's/\(.*\)ABC$/\1DEF/g'