# To replace all occurrences of "day" with "night" and write to stdout: sed 's/day/night/g' file.txt # To replace all occurrences of "day" with "night" within file.txt: sed -i 's/day/night/g' file.txt # To replace all occurrences of "day" with "night" on stdin: echo 'It is daytime' | sed 's/day/night/g' # To remove leading spaces sed -i -r 's/^\s+//g' file.txt # To remove empty lines and print results to stdout: sed '/^$/d' file.txt # To replace newlines in multiple lines sed ':a;N;$!ba;s/\n//g' file.txt