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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-26T21:58:02+00:00

This is what I’m trying to do: Replace all instances of a period with

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This is what I’m trying to do: Replace all instances of a period with (1) a period, (2) a new line and a (3) semicolon. There are a lot of questions about this that I’ve been looking at but they assume a lot of programmer knowledge. Here are some things I need to do, that I don’t know how to do:

  1. Write the path of the txt you want to do a find and replace in correctly.
  2. Writing the find and replace command.
  3. Choosing what unix tool to use (support for inserting new lines is necessary).
  4. Launching it correctly from terminal.
  5. How to represent newline in the relevant tool.
  6. There’s probably something else I haven’t thought of.
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You can do this with awk. 

    awk -F"." -v OFS=".\n;" '{ $1=$1; print $0 }' filename.txt

    What this does is to view each line of the text file filename.txt as a record separated by periods, rebuilding the record with the period, newline, and semicolon as a new field separator.

    Addendum To capture the output into a file, use a redirection like this:

    awk -F"." -v OFS=".\n;" '{ $1=$1; print $0 }' filename.txt > outfile.txt
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