How to replace an entire line in a text file by line number

Not the greatest, but this should work:

sed -i 'Ns/.*/replacement-line/' file.txt

where N should be replaced by your target line number. This replaces the line in the original file. To save the changed text in a different file, drop the -i option:

sed 'Ns/.*/replacement-line/' file.txt > new_file.txt

I actually used this script to replace a line of code in the cron file on our company's UNIX servers awhile back. We executed it as normal shell script and had no problems:

#Create temporary file with new line in placecat /dir/file | sed -e "s/the_original_line/the_new_line/" > /dir/temp_file#Copy the new file over the original filemv /dir/temp_file /dir/file

This doesn't go by line number, but you can easily switch to a line number based system by putting the line number before the s/ and placing a wildcard in place of the_original_line.

Let's suppose you want to replace line 4 with the text "different". You can use AWK like so:

awk '{ if (NR == 4) print "different"; else print $0}' input_file.txt > output_file.txt

AWK considers the input to be "records" divided into "fields". By default, one line is one record. NR is the number of records seen. $0 represents the current complete record (while $1 is the first field from the record and so on; by default the fields are words from the line).

So, if the current line number is 4, print the string "different" but otherwise print the line unchanged.

In AWK, program code enclosed in { } runs once on each input record.

You need to quote the AWK program in single-quotes to keep the shell from trying to interpret things like the $0.

EDIT: A shorter and more elegant AWK program from @chepner in the comments below:

awk 'NR==4 {$0="different"} { print }' input_file.txt

Only for record (i.e. line) number 4, replace the whole record with the string "different". Then for every input record, print the record.

Clearly my AWK skills are rusty! Thank you, @chepner.

EDIT: and see also an even shorter version from @Dennis Williamson:

awk 'NR==4 {$0="different"} 1' input_file.txt

How this works is explained in the comments: the 1 always evaluates true, so the associated code block always runs. But there is no associated code block, which means AWK does its default action of just printing the whole line. AWK is designed to allow terse programs like this.