AFAIC both sed and awk are general purpose text processing utilities with whom a user can get quite similar results, in a slightly different syntax: With both, a user could add, replace/translate and delete content in a file. What is the main difference between these two general purpose text processing utilities and the tr text processing utility? I assume that tr's functionality is included in both sed and awk so it is just narrowed to the specific context of **replacing** one string in another, but I'm not sure I'm accurate here or **translating** it to another.

I don't think this question has been asked before, so I don't know if sed is capable of this. Suppose I have a bunch of numbers in a sentence that I need to expand into words, a practical example being to swap the numbered citations in a typical essay into MLA format: essay.txt: Sentence 1 . sentence two . Sentence three. Key.txt (this is a tab delimited file): 1 source-one 2 source-two 3 source-three ...etc Expected Result.txt: Sentence 1 [source-one]. sentence two [source-one][source-two]. Sentence three[source-one][source-three] Here's my pseudocode attempt, but I don't understand enough about sed or tr to do it right: cat essay.txt | sed s/$(awk {print $1} key.txt)/$(awk {print $2} key.txt)/g PS: If there's a trick in notepad++ for mass find-and-replace using multiple terms, that'd be great. As it is, it seems like find-and-replace only works for one term at a time, but I need a way to do it en masse for many terms at once.

I was playing around with tr and got some unexpected results. What is happening in these situations? I don't understand what is happening under the hood, or perhaps I'm not using this command correctly. ### Example A

echo '0123456789' | tr [:digit:] '12'

1222222222

--- ### Example B1

echo '1111111111' | tr [:digit:] '12'

2222222222

### Example B2

echo '1111111111' | tr '1' '12'

1111111111

--- ### Example C1 Works as expected.

echo '0123456789' | tr '5' 'x'

01234x6789

### Example C2 I expected this to produce 01234xx6789 maybe, or it somehow explains all these examples - in that only the original character can be replaced (additional characters cannot be added).

echo '0123456789' | tr '5' 'xx'

01234x6789

The first command below produces each number on a separate line, and I would expect the second command to do the same thing because the only difference between the two is that we are using echo '1 2 3' and echo {1..3} (both of which produce the same output). **But, the second command produces the numbers that are separated by tabs instead of new lines. Why?** Furthermore, notice that the only difference between the second and the third commands is that we are passing the result to paste via process substitution, but without that, it shows the expected result, which could imply that it is a paste related issue, but I don't quite see what the issue is.

§ paste  /dev/null 
1
2
3

§ paste  /dev/null 
1
2
3

--- If it matters, here are the versions of the tools:

§ which tr paste
/usr/local/opt/coreutils/libexec/gnubin/tr
/usr/local/opt/coreutils/libexec/gnubin/paste

§ tr --version
tr (GNU coreutils) 9.1
Copyright (C) 2022 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later .

Written by Jim Meyering.

§ paste --version
paste (GNU coreutils) 9.1
Copyright (C) 2022 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later .

Written by David M. Ihnat and David MacKenzie.

§ bash --version
bash --version
GNU bash, version 3.2.57(1)-release (x86_64-apple-darwin20)
Copyright (C) 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

§ sw_vers
ProductName:	macOS
ProductVersion:	11.7.10
BuildVersion:	20G1427

I am on macOS, but use GNU utils installed via brew. --- Addition debug information requested by comments with set -x active:

§ paste <(echo {1..3} | tr ' ' '\t' | tr '\t' '\n')
+ paste /dev/fd/63 /dev/fd/62 /dev/fd/61
++ echo 1
++ echo 3
++ tr ' ' '\t'
++ tr ' ' '\t'
++ tr '\t' '\n'
++ tr '\t' '\n'
++ echo 2
++ tr ' ' '\t'
++ tr '\t' '\n'
1	2	3

§ paste <(echo {1..3} | tr ' ' '\n')
+ paste /dev/fd/63 /dev/fd/62 /dev/fd/61
++ echo 1
++ tr ' ' '\n'
++ echo 2
++ echo 3
++ tr ' ' '\n'
++ tr ' ' '\n'
1	2	3

§ echo {1..3} | tr ' ' '\n' | paste
+ tr ' ' '\n'
+ echo 1 2 3
+ paste
1
2
3

And hexdump output:

§ paste <(echo {1..3} | tr ' ' '\n') | hexdump -C
00000000  31 09 32 09 33 0a                                 |1.2.3.|
00000006

§ echo {1..3} | tr ' ' '\n' | paste | hexdump -C
00000000  31 0a 32 0a 33 0a                                 |1.2.3.|
00000006

I have a file containing the below pattern, up to 2000 lines. For every group of three lines, the pattern repeats with different numerical values, but text values at the beginning are common up to the end of the file. Here I need to merge set of three lines Input like below ABC 1223334 Days 344678544324677 Base 45666 ABC 1234565 Days 234567899765443 Base 456643 Need output looks like ABC 1223334 Days 344678544324677 Base 45666 ABC 1234565 Days 234567899765443 Base 456643

This is the error I am getting and it's failing because of a variable whose value is supposed to be 2 (I am getting this using a select * from tabel). I am getting spaces in that variable. + 0 != 2 ./setjobs: 0: not found. How do I remove all those spaces or a newline from that variable? Can tr, sed, or anything help? This what I am doing: set_jobs_count=$(echo "set heading off; select count(*) from oppar_db where ( oppar_db_job_name, oppar_db_job_rec ) in ($var) ;" | \ sqlplus -s ${OP_ORA_USER}/${OP_ORA_PASS}@$OPERATIONAL_DB_NAME) --- This works as suggested: | sed 's/[[:space:]]//g' But I still obtain a value like : set_jobs_count= 2

Given a text, $ cat a.txt Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nam at magna sed libero accumsan ultrices. Proin varius tortor risus, at pulvinar quam auctor vitae. Etiam iaculis ipsum quis lacus convallis finibus. Nunc fermentum, nunc sit amet egestas congue, odio quam sollicitudin velit, quis venenatis augue nibh sed tortor. I can't remove that double empty lines using this command. $ tr '\n\n' '\n' < a.txt Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nam at magna sed libero accumsan ultrices. Proin varius tortor risus, at pulvinar quam auctor vitae. Etiam iaculis ipsum quis lacus convallis finibus. Nunc fermentum, nunc sit amet egestas congue, odio quam sollicitudin velit, quis venenatis augue nibh sed tortor. Replacing single new line with other char works, isn't it strange?

I wanted to use tr to substitute "illegal" characters in a string with a replacement character, where "illegal" characters are all outside of a set of "allowed" characters (_i.e._ they are the complement of the set of allowed characters). However, when using the -c option and either the explicit * repeat specifier or the implicit extension of "set 2", tr appends an _additional_ instance of the replacement character to the output. **To reproduce** * Let the "allowed" characters be a-n, specified literally as abcdefghijklmn. * Let the replacement character be z. * Let the input string be either hell or hello. The expected output string is then hell and hellz, respectively. **Demonstration** 1. Illegal characters present, implicit set 2 extension

-shellsession
    $ echo "hello" | tr -c 'abcdefghijklmn' 'z'
    hellzz

The expected output is hellz. 2. Only allowed characters present, implicit set 2 extension

-shellsession
    $ echo "hell" | tr -c 'abcdefghijklmn' 'z'
    hellz

The expected output is hell. 3. Illegal characters present, explicit set 2 extension

-shellsession
    $ echo "hello" | tr -c 'abcdefghijklmn' '[z*]'
    hellzz

The expected output is hellz. 4. Only allowed characters present, explicit set 2 extension

-shellsession
    $ echo "hell" | tr -c 'abcdefghijklmn' '[z*]'
    hellz

The expected output is hell. 5. The same happens when I use a here-string instead of echo-pipe (actually, the here-string was the construct I used when I stumbled upon this effect for the first time):

-shellsession
    $ tr -c 'abcdefghijkl' '[z*]' <<< "hello"
    hellzz

Why does tr append an additional z here? This is on Linux, with bash, UTF-8 locale, and tr from both GNU coreutils 8.25 and 8.30.

The top answer to [this question](https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/109835/how-do-i-use-cut-to-separate-by-multiple-whitespace) demonstrates that cut can be used with tr to cut based on repeated spaces with

< file tr -s ' ' | cut -d ' ' -f 8

I want to get the remotes of several Git repos in a directory and am attempting to extract the remote URL fields from each with the following:

ls | xargs -I{} git -C {} remote -vv | sed -n 'p;n' | tr -s " " | cut -d ' ' -f1

However, this results in (for example) the following output, where I can see that two consecutive spaces (Unicode code point 32) are retained:

origin  https://github.com/jik876/hifi-gan.git 
origin  https://github.com/NVIDIA/NeMo.git 
origin  https://github.com/NVIDIA/tacotron2.git 

(I have also using xargs with tr) The desired output is a list of URLs, like:

https://github.com/jik876/hifi-gan.git 
https://github.com/NVIDIA/NeMo.git 
https://github.com/NVIDIA/tacotron2.git 

What am I missing here?

I want to use the tr command to rename something like filename.ext to someName.ext. To do that I've tried

echo "filename.ext" | tr -c ".a-z" "someName"`

to replace the _complement_ (-c) of the filename extension (specified as period, followed by lower-case letters) with the new basename. However, it does not work - tr isn't recognizing it as a complement of a period followed by small case alphabets to be replaced by something else. What am I missing here?

I have a code: 1 /** 2 a b c 3 **/ 4 int main() { 5 int x; 6 if ( condition) { 7 return x; 8 } 9 } I need to change multiple whitespaces between tokens or strings to single whitespace eg in line 7 but comments (line 2) should not be affected nor the leading tabs in the code. So, the output should be: 1 /** 2 a b c 3 **/ 4 int main() { 5 int x; 6 if ( condition) { 7 return x; 8 } 9 } I tried using 'tr': ~$ tr -s " " < file but it changed line 2 as well as removed leading tabs in line 5 to line 8. Can it be done using sed?

According to https://caseconverter.com/ > “Upper Case” WHICH CONVERTS ALL THE LETTER INTO CAPITALS LIKE THIS. > > “Lower Case” which converts all the letters into small letters like > this. > > “Proper Case” Which Converts The Text So Every Word Has Its First > Letter Capitalised Like This > > “Sentence Case”. This capitalises the first letter of each sentence, > and converts the rest of the text to lower case. So the first letter > after every full stop is automatically converted into a capital > letter. The first two can be accomplish easily with tr command. user@linux:~$ tr [:lower:] [:upper:] <<< eXaMPLe EXAMPLE user@linux:~$ user@linux:~$ tr [:upper:] [:lower:] <<< eXaMPLe example user@linux:~$ or user@linux:~$ tr [a-z] [A-Z] <<< eXaMPLe EXAMPLE user@linux:~$ user@linux:~$ tr [A-Z] [a-z] <<< eXaMPLe example user@linux:~$ What about the last two which are "Proper Case" and "Sentence Case"? Is it possible? If yes, please let me know. If not, what is the alternative?

I have temp file with some lower-case and upper-case contents. ## Input ## Contents of my temp file: hi Jigar GANDHI jiga I want to convert all **upper to lower**. ## Command ## I tried the following command: sed -e "s/[A-Z]/[a-z]/g" temp but got wrong output. ## Output ## I want it as: hi jigar gandhi jiga What needs to be in the *substitute* part of argument for sed?

I'm brand new to UNIX and I am using Kirk McElhearn's "The Mac OS X Command Line" to teach myself some commands. I am attempting to use tr and grep so that I can search for text strings in a regular MS-Office Word Document. $ tr '\r' '\n' robomechanoid:Position-Paper-Final-Draft robertjralph$ tr '\r' '\n' < Position-Paper-Final-Version.docx | grep DeCSS tr: Illegal byte sequence robomechanoid:Position-Paper-Final-Draft robertjralph$ I've actually run the same line on a script that I created in vi and it does the search correctly.

I am debugging an embedded server that outputs a continuous single line of text to a specified network port. There is no newline anywhere in the stream but it is text data and I would like to format it as it outputs. I have tried using tr (translate) to swap a character in the stream for a newline which works, however it is impossible to find a unique single character that can always be sensibly replaced by a newline. My initial thought was to use sed to add a newline character to a pattern of 2-3 characters but because sed is line based and the stream is a never ending single line, sed will never complete the process! Is there a non line based sed alternative?

I'm trying to get a list of all lowercase words in a file. This far I've gotten to the point of getting a list with the command line cat filename.txt | tr ' ' \\n | grep -w '[[:lower:]]*' | sort -u | less However, this command doesn't get rid of the non-alphabetic characters in the list; I get a list with the form (which (which, about about, about. about: about; about? which I'm interested only in the lines with only the words. How can I get them with a similar line command?