Editing Sed (section)

==Limitations and alternatives==
While simple and limited, sed is sufficiently powerful for a large number of purposes. For more sophisticated processing, more powerful languages such as [[AWK]] or [[Perl]] are used instead. These are particularly used if transforming a line in a way more complicated than a regex extracting and template replacement, though arbitrarily complicated transforms are in principle possible by using the hold buffer.

Conversely, for simpler operations, specialized Unix utilities such as [[grep]] (print lines matching a pattern), [[head (Unix)|head]] (print the first part of a file), [[tail (Unix)|tail]] (print the last part of a file), and [[tr (Unix)|tr]] (translate or delete characters) are often preferable. For the specific tasks they are designed to carry out, such specialized utilities are usually simpler, clearer, and faster than a more general solution such as sed.

The ed/sed commands and syntax continue to be used in descendent programs, such as the text editors [[Vi (text editor)|vi]] and [[vim (text editor)|vim]]. An analog to ed/sed is [[Sam (text editor)|sam]]/ssam, where sam is the [[Plan 9 from Bell Labs|Plan 9]] editor, and ssam is a stream interface to it, yielding functionality similar to sed.