sed (
stream editor) is a
Unix utility that parses and transforms text, using a simple, compact programming language. sed was developed from 1973 to 1974 by
Lee E. McMahon of
Bell Labs, and is available today for most operating systems. sed was based on the scripting features of the interactive editor
ed ("editor", 1971) and the earlier
qed ("quick editor", 1965–66). sed was one of the earliest tools to support
regular expressions, and remains in use for text processing, most notably with the substitution command. Other options for doing "stream editing" include
AWK and
Perl.