sed

“GNU programs do lots of things poorly, starting with "echo -e" and "cat -n" and continuing through to tools like awk and sed.”

“Assuming you have run brew install gnutools on your Mac that should enable local dev for scripts that run on Linux.”

“the functional equivalent of find . -iname '*.csproj' | xargs sed -E -i.bak”

“sed might take several attempts to get results”

“thinking about pattern matching is fun, it's a little puzzle solved with a skillset that transfers to other cli tools”

“Access to a well-established set of tools for operating on unstructured text”

“knowing a bit awk, perl and sed might help as well, as they tend to be available by default.”

“well established and solid unix toolchain”

“Don't need much more'n that to get yerself into all kinda trouble”

“these don't work in macOS/BSD sed (even with -E flag)”

“you can immediately reuse the command on a different file”

“sed has different syntax on macos because macos is based on BSD.”

“does that really mean that sed is the highly optimized path?”

“When I code I stream via sed for maximum efficiency.”

“then do a bit of awk or shell scripting with sed”

“The best part about sed is that it can generally be found in any *nix system.”

“g/PATTERN/ and /v/PATTERN/ are supzr powerful”

“Mostly it's useful in my experience on systems without Perl installed”

“I wish I'd invested that effort in learning perl oneliners instead”

“sed is something everyone had to learn, even if they did not realize it”

“bash and sed and suchlike turn out to be the most useful tools for unlocking the abilities of AI agents”

“or even shelling out to sed) is often a better choice”

“I do actually use sed since it is so convenient but I am not the biggest fan of it either”

“Three tools born in Bell Labs that still power every server, every pipeline”

“can accomplish in a few readable lines what people write long programs to handle in other languages”

“Not with sed and awk they aren't.”

“which is a whole programming language well suited for templating”

“it probably runs faster than the original sed after compilation.”

“Sed and awk are the ideal way to manipulate structured data!”

“even my 13 year old great nephew can do this without ai”

“Mutating a file in place, and needing a GNU extension for it.”

“sed, awk; all better than the crap they have spawned”

“plain shell scripts, sed, awk, grep and xargs”

“I still have to do a search (or use an LLM) to do anything useful with sed, xargs, etc.”

“stuff that awk/sed won't cut it for”

“I've had more trouble, including bugs, with other utilities, like sed, tr, paste, etc.”

“Some that aren't replaceable with bash (and sed and awk).”

“sed is a time-saver, enabling computer users to make the most of the time they have left”

“awk is so much better than sed to learn”

“Sed was also a really strong tool.”