Find and replace in file and overwrite file doesn&

Question

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 I run this and look at the file afterward, it is empty. It deleted the contents of my file.

When I run this after restoring the file again:

sed -e s/STRING_TO_REPLACE/STRING_TO_REPLACE_IT/g index.html

The stdout is the contents of the file, and the find and replace has been executed.

Why is this happening?

Answer 1

I was searching for the option where I can define the line range and found the answer. For example I want to change host1 to host2 from line 36-57.

sed '36,57 s/host1/host2/g' myfile.txt > myfile1.txt

You can use gi option as well to ignore the character case.

sed '30,40 s/version/story/gi' myfile.txt > myfile1.txt