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

Solution 1:

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

Solution 2:

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 place
cat /dir/file | sed -e "s/the_original_line/the_new_line/" > /dir/temp_file
#Copy the new file over the original file
mv /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.