Using SED and AWK to remove/replace substrings

Again, when we need to remove a pesky character or remove sections of strings upon occurrence, we can always rely on these two powerful commands: sed and awk. And while we saw that Bash does indeed have a similar functionality built-in, the full tools are able to offer the same and more complex functionality. So, when should we use these tools?

• When we care less about the speed that might be gained by using the built-in functionality of Bash
• When more complex features are needed (when programming constructs like multi-dimensional arrays are required or editing streams)
• When we are focused on portability (Bash might be embedded or a limited version and standalone tools may be required)

Note

Complete books have been written on both SED and AWK, and you can always find far more information online at https://www.gnu.org/software/sed/ and https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/.

Stream editor (SED) is a handy text manipulation tool that is great for one-liners...