Sed Question

[Doc Trins O'Grace]

The sed usenet is rarely frequented by sed people. I hope that I am known well enough in this usenet that I can be permitted to ask a brief, simple sed question:

In sed there are two switches I have about which I have a question:

-e

and

-f

Would someone kindly explain the difference between these two switches?

Thank you for your time and patience.

--Doc

[Ben Bacarisse]

"Doc Trins O'Grace" <doctrin...@gmail.com> writes:

> The sed usenet is rarely frequented by sed people. I hope that I am
> known well enough in this usenet that I can be permitted to ask a
> brief, simple sed question:

comp.unix.programmer can be used for generic questions like this despite
really being about programming rather than tools. I doubt anyone would
mind.

> In sed there are two switches I have about which I have a question:
>
> -e
>
> and
>
> -f
>
> Would someone kindly explain the difference between these two
> switches?

Did the manual page not say enough:

-e script, --expression=script

add the script to the commands to be executed

-f script-file, --file=script-file

add the contents of script-file to the commands to be executed

--
Ben.

[Ed Morton]

On 7/7/2017 1:31 PM, Doc Trins O'Grace wrote:
> The sed usenet is rarely frequented by sed people. I hope that I am known well enough in this usenet that I can be permitted to ask a brief, simple sed question:

You'd be better off posting it at https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/sed.

Ed.

[Kaz Kylheku]

On 2017-07-07, Doc Trins O'Grace <doctrin...@gmail.com> wrote:
> The sed usenet is rarely frequented by sed people. I hope that I am known well enough in this usenet that I can be permitted to ask a brief, simple sed question:
>
> In sed there are two switches I have about which I have a question:
>
> -e
>
> and
>
> -f
>
> Would someone kindly explain the difference between these two switches?

The argument to -f is the name of a sed script: a file which contains sed commands.

The argument to -e is itself a script of sed commands.

If your documentation is saying "-e script" versus "-e script-file",
you have to understand that "script" in "-e script" literally refers to
a script in the command line, not to a script file.

sed -e s/foo/bar/ # replace foo with bar

sed -f foobar # carrry out foobar script

If the file foobar contains nothing but the line

s/foo/bar

then the above two are equivalent.

[Spiros Bousbouras]

On Fri, 07 Jul 2017 19:45:33 +0100
Ben Bacarisse <ben.u...@bsb.me.uk> wrote:
> "Doc Trins O'Grace" <doctrin...@gmail.com> writes:
>
> > The sed usenet is rarely frequented by sed people. I hope that I am
> > known well enough in this usenet that I can be permitted to ask a
> > brief, simple sed question:

Which group is "sed usenet" ?

> comp.unix.programmer can be used for generic questions like this despite
> really being about programming rather than tools. I doubt anyone would
> mind.

Even better comp.unix.shell .