How to delete from a text file, all lines that contain a specific string?

shell sed text-parsing in-place
A Clockwork Orange picture A Clockwork Orange · Mar 23, 2011 · Viewed 1.9M times · Source

How would I use sed to delete all lines in a text file that contain a specific string?

Answer

SiegeX picture SiegeX · Mar 23, 2011

To remove the line and print the output to standard out:

sed '/pattern to match/d' ./infile

To directly modify the file – does not work with BSD sed:

sed -i '/pattern to match/d' ./infile

Same, but for BSD sed (Mac OS X and FreeBSD) – does not work with GNU sed:

sed -i '' '/pattern to match/d' ./infile

To directly modify the file (and create a backup) – works with BSD and GNU sed:

sed -i.bak '/pattern to match/d' ./infile

Related questions

Find and replace in file and overwrite file doesn't work, it empties the file

I would like to run a find and replace on an HTML file through the command line. My command looks something like this: sed -e s/STRING_TO_REPLACE/STRING_TO_REPLACE_IT/g index.html > index.html When …

Read More
Replace whole line containing a string using Sed

I have a text file which has a particular line something like sometext sometext sometext TEXT_TO_BE_REPLACED sometext sometext sometext I need to replace the whole line above with This line is removed by the admin. The search …

Read More
Bash tool to get nth line from a file

Is there a "canonical" way of doing that? I've been using head -n | tail -1 which does the trick, but I've been wondering if there's a Bash tool that specifically extracts a line (or a range of lines) from a …

Read More