How to delete from a text file, all lines that contain a specific string?

Question

How would I use sed to delete all lines in a text file that contain a specific string?

Answer 1

I have made a small benchmark with a file which contains approximately 345 000 lines. The way with grep seems to be around 15 times faster than the sed method in this case.

I have tried both with and without the setting LC_ALL=C, it does not seem change the timings significantly. The search string (CDGA_00004.pdbqt.gz.tar) is somewhere in the middle of the file.

Here are the commands and the timings:

time sed -i "/CDGA_00004.pdbqt.gz.tar/d" /tmp/input.txt

real    0m0.711s
user    0m0.179s
sys     0m0.530s

time perl -ni -e 'print unless /CDGA_00004.pdbqt.gz.tar/' /tmp/input.txt

real    0m0.105s
user    0m0.088s
sys     0m0.016s

time (grep -v CDGA_00004.pdbqt.gz.tar /tmp/input.txt > /tmp/input.tmp; mv /tmp/input.tmp /tmp/input.txt )

real    0m0.046s
user    0m0.014s
sys     0m0.019s