Sed is a very useful program that often is used as a filter in shell scripts.

From the sed man page:

Sed  is a stream editor.  A stream editor is used to perform basic text
transformations on an input stream (a file or input from  a  pipeline).

== Simple find-and-replace in text file ==
To replace all occurrences of the string ''findme'' and replace it with the string ''replcaceme'' in a file named test.file using ''sed'' just use the follwing command.

sed -e 's/findme/replaceme/g' test.fil > newtest.fil

== Removing a complete XML element with body ==
Consider the following XML formated addressbook.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

Lets say we want to remove ''Bob'' from this addressbook.

sed -e '// d' addressbook.xml