mjhjmtu

Is there a way to make sed ask me for confirmation before each replace? Something similar to 'c' when using replace inside vim.

Does sed do this at all?

Doing it with sed would probably not be possible as it's a non-interactive stream editor. Wrapping sed in a script would require far too much thinking. It is easier to just do it with vim:

vim -c '%s/PATTERN/REPLACEMENT/gc' -c 'wq' file.in

Since it was mentioned in comments below, here's how this would be used on multiple files matching a particular filename globbing pattern in the current directory:

for fname in file*.txt; do
 vim -c '%s/PATTERN/REPLACEMENT/gc' -c 'wq' "$fname"
done

Or, if you first want to make sure that the file really contains a line that matches the given pattern first, before performing the substitution,

for fname in file*.txt; do
 grep -q 'PATTERN' "$fname" &&
 vim -c '%s/PATTERN/REPLACEMENT/gc' -c 'wq' "$fname"
done

The above two shell loops modified into find commands that do the same things but for all files with a particular name somewhere in or under some top-dir directory,

find top-dir -type f -name 'file*.txt' 
 -exec vim -c '%s/PATTERN/REPLACEMENT/gc' -c 'wq' ;

find top-dir -type f -name 'file*.txt' 
 -exec grep -q 'PATTERN' ; 
 -exec vim -c '%s/PATTERN/REPLACEMENT/gc' -c 'wq' ;

Or, using the original shell loops and having find feed pathnames into them:

find top-dir -type f -name 'file*.txt' -exec sh -c '
 for pathname do
 vim -c "%s/PATTERN/REPLACEMENT/gc" -c "wq" "$pathname"
 done' sh +

find top-dir -type f -name 'file*.txt' -exec sh -c '
 for pathname do
 grep -q "PATTERN" "$pathname" &&
 vim -c "%s/PATTERN/REPLACEMENT/gc" -c "wq" "$pathname"
 done' sh +

You do, in any case, not want to do something like for filename in $( grep -rl ... ) since

1. it would require that grep finishes running before even starting the first iteration of loop, which is inelegant, and


2. the pathnames returned by grep would be split into words on whitespaces, and these words would undergo filename globbing (this disqualifies pathnames that contains spaces and special characters).

Related:

• Understanding the -exec option of `find`

You can get this by doing such:

:%s/OLD_TEXT/NEW_TEXT/gc

Specifically, adding the c after the third delimiter.

Note that the 'c' option only works in Vim; you won't be able to use it with sed at the command line.

You could let sed do its thing on the file and then save the result to a temporary file which you can then interactively patch into the original file using sdiff (see http://www.gnu.org/software/diffutils/manual/diffutils.html#Invoking-sdiff):

sed -r 's/something/something_else/g' my_file > tmp_file
sdiff -o my_file -s -d my_file tmp_file