The sed man page has a synopsis for the substitute command (s) which is:

s/regexp/replacement/

I have to go to the sed FAQ (http://sed.sourceforge.net/grabbag/tutorials/sedfaq.txt), section 3.1.3, Substitution switches, to get a list of the possible switches. While there are 8 switches I use ‘g’ most often to do a global search/replace on the input line. Without this, only the first match is replaced. The FAQ also describes the ‘I’ switch for doing a case-insensitive search which may be useful in certain cases. The other 6 switches I have never used: N (a number), p, w, M, S, and X.

The version and date on the Ubuntu 20.04 sed man page is sed 4.7, December 2018. The AIX V7.1 man page for sed does contain a description of the ‘s’ switches (flags). Here is what that man page says about the ‘s’ command:

s/pattern/replacement/flags

    Substitutes the replacement string for the first occurrence of the

    pattern parameter in the pattern space. Any character that is

    displayed after the s subcommand can substitute for the / (slash)

    separator except for the space or new-line character.

    See the Pattern Matching section of the ed command.

    The value of the flags variable must be zero or more of:

      g

        Substitutes all non-overlapping instances of the pattern

        parameter rather than just the first one.

      n

        Substitutes for the n-th occurrence only of the pattern

        parameter.

      p

        Writes the pattern space to standard output if a

        replacement was made.

      w WFile

        Writes the pattern space to the WFile variable if a

        replacement was made. Appends the pattern space to the

        WFile variable. If the WFile variable was not already

        created by a previous write by this sed script, the sed

        command creates it.

I was unable to find a version number on the AIX sed man page or the executable (cat /usr/bin/sed |strings -3|sort|uniq|less). That man page doesn’t list a –version or –V command line option. They don’t work anyway.

The sed man page should, when describing the ‘s’ command, at least describe the ‘g’ switch, and maybe also describe the ‘I’ switch.

Tom Ekberg
Senior Computer Specialist

Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology
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Email: tekberg@uw.edu