[linux] "sed" command in bash

Could someone explain this command for me:

cat | sed -e 's,%,$,g' | sudo tee /etc/init.d/dropbox << EOF
   echo "Hello World"
EOF

What does the "sed" command do?

Here sed is replacing all occurrences of % with $ in its standard input.

As an example

$ echo 'foo%bar%' | sed -e 's,%,$,g'

will produce "foo$bar$".

It reads Hello World (cat), replaces all (g) occurrences of % by $ and (over)writes it to /etc/init.d/dropbox as root.

sed is a stream editor. I would say try man sed.If you didn't find this man page in your system refer this URL:

http://unixhelp.ed.ac.uk/CGI/man-cgi?sed