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    To see some examples of pushing the boundaries of sed: sed.sourceforge.net/#scripts
    – Dennis Williamson
    Commented Oct 27, 2009 at 21:58
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    @DennisWilliamson - Am I at a disadvantage if I only learn awk ? Is awk far more commonly used than sed ?
    – Steam
    Commented Aug 20, 2013 at 18:24
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    @blasto: My recommendation is to learn both but with more emphasis on awk. Lots of the regular expression stuff applies to both (and other tools and languages). Use sed for simpler stuff and try to avoid the complex things. It's really cool that you can do loops and branches in sed, but the resulting command lines are complex and hard to read. The answer to your question really depends on what you're doing.
    – Dennis Williamson
    Commented Aug 20, 2013 at 19:52
  • @DennisWilliamson - What would be most useful to an ETL developer ? ETL or Extract Transform and Load is a data-warehousing term. Put crudely, the job involves EXTRACTION of data from different disparate sources (such as DB's, excel files, csv files etc), TRANSFORMATION of the same and then LOADING into a datawarehouse (DW) for analysis, finding patterns in data, or just historical records. eg. End use of a DW - Algorithms applied to a DW of a grocery store which has data from the past 10 years might reveal that people who tend to buy apples also buy oranges or something similar.
    – Steam
    Commented Aug 20, 2013 at 19:56
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    Just an FYI for anyone stumbling across this on a mac, try "sed -E 's/-([0-9]+.[0-9]*)/(\1)/g'" for the first sed example
    – Daniel Schmidt
    Commented May 8, 2018 at 21:05