Question 27070 in CentOS Question posted in
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sed replace second occurrence in file not working – CentOS

I’m using centos 7. sed command to replace second occurrence not working to me.
I tried the following solutions:

The file:

this
foo
is
a test
file
this
foo

I am trying to run:

sed 's/foo/bar/2g' file
sed 's/foo/bar/2' file
sed -i 's/foo/bar/2g' file

I wish to replace all occurrences of "foo" with "bar" from the second one.

Tags:

2

Answers


  1. 0

    This will perform a substitution on the second and all subsequent lines containing the specified pattern (/foo/):

    sed ':1; /foo/! { n; b1 }; :2; n; s/foo/bar/; b2' file

    It has two parts:

    • :1; /foo/! { n; b1 }; is a loop, reading lines and outputting them unchanged until the first is encountered that matches /foo/.
    • :2; n; s/foo/bar/; b2 is a loop that repeatedly outputs the current line, reads the next and performs the substitution s/foo/bar/. The substitution is a harmless no-op for lines that do not contain the pattern.

    The first match to the pattern is the current line at the beginning of the second loop, so it is output unchanged when second loop first executes its n command.

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  2. 0

    This might work for you (GNU sed):

    sed -z 's/foo/bar/2' file

    Slurps the whole for file into the pattern space and replaces the second occurrence of foo with bar.

    Alternative:

    sed 'H;$!d;x;s/.//;s/foo/bar/2' file
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