sed whole word search and replace

Question

How do I search and replace whole words using sed   Doing  sed -i  s  oldtext   newtext  g   lt file gt     will also replace partial matches of  oldtext  which I don t want it to do

User · Answer

Use  b for word boundaries   sed -i  s  boldtext b newtext g   lt file gt

User · Answer

On Mac OS X  neither of these regex syntaxes work inside sed for matching whole words    bmyWord b   lt myWord  gt    Hear me now and believe me later  this ugly syntax is what you need to use         lt    myWord    gt        So  for example  to replace mint with minty for whole words only    sed  s     lt    mint    gt     minty g    Source  re format man page

User · Answer

b in regular expressions match word boundaries  i e  the location between the first word character and non-word character      echo  bar embarassment    sed  s  bbar b no bar g  no bar embarassment

User · Answer

in shell command   echo  bar embarassment    sed  s  bbar b no bar g     or   echo  bar embarassment    sed  s   lt bar  gt  no bar g    but if you are in vim  you can only use the later      s   lt old  gt  new g

User · Answer

echo  bar embarassment  awk   for o 1 o lt  NF o   if  o   bar   o  no bar  1  no bar embarassment

User · Answer

In one of my machine  delimiting the word with   b   without the quotes  did not work  The solution was to use    lt   for starting delimiter and    gt   for ending delimiter    To explain with Joakim Lundberg s example     echo  bar embarassment    sed  s   lt bar  gt  no bar g  no bar embarassment

[shell] sed whole word search and replace

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