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I have some tables for which I need to replace a field that has a random position in each table.

For information, the table are semicolon separated fields and I would like to replace the field "datum" by "YEAR-MONTH-DAY".

So far, I have tried:

sed -i 's/datum/YEAR-MONTH-DAY/g' input > output

But it just outputs an empty file.

Jeff Schaller
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steve
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1 Answers1

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As steeldriver astutely pointed out in the comments, you've told sed to -i edit the file in-place. As a result, sed will not provide any output, and so the > redirection will put that nothing into the output file.

Either keep the -i flag and accept that the input file will be updated in-place:

sed -i 's/datum/YEAR-MONTH-DAY/g' input

or drop the -i flag and use the redirection to put the updated contents in the output file:

sed    's/datum/YEAR-MONTH-DAY/g' input > output
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Jeff Schaller
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