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I want to try the newest sed utility on Ubuntu Server 18.04. I've tried below command but still not able to upgrade it. How can I do that?

root@u1804:~# apt update

Hit:1 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic InRelease

Get:2 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic-updates InRelease [88.7 kB]

Get:3 https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu bionic InRelease [64.4 kB]

Get:4 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic-backports InRelease [74.6 kB]

Get:5 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic-security InRelease [83.2 kB]

Fetched 311 kB in 7s (47.3 kB/s)

Reading package lists... Done

Building dependency tree

Reading state information... Done

97 packages can be upgraded. Run 'apt list --upgradable' to see them.

root@u1804:~# 

root@u1804:~# apt show sed

Package: sed

Version: 4.4-2

Priority: required

Essential: yes

Section: utils

Origin: Ubuntu

Maintainer: Ubuntu Developers <ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com>

Original-Maintainer: Clint Adams <clint@debian.org>

Bugs: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+filebug

Installed-Size: 328 kB

Pre-Depends: libc6 (>= 2.14), libselinux1 (>= 1.32)

Homepage: https://www.gnu.org/software/sed/

Task: minimal

Supported: 5y

Download-Size: 182 kB

APT-Manual-Installed: yes

APT-Sources: http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic/main amd64 Packages

Description: GNU stream editor for filtering/transforming text

 sed reads the specified files or the standard input if no

 files are specified, makes editing changes according to a

 list of commands, and writes the results to the standard

 output.

root@u1804:~#

root@u1804:~# apt install --only-upgrade sed

Reading package lists... Done

Building dependency tree

Reading state information... Done

sed is already the newest version (4.4-2).

0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 97 not upgraded.

root@u1804:~#

Note: the latest version of GNU sed at the time of writing is 4.7, not 4.5.

Here is an alternative option: compile directly from the source tarball, using two very useful features of GNU source packages.

• You can install your new version of sed under any other name you want, so that it will not interfere with your current sed; in this answer I will use sed47.


• The make uninstall command is supported, which allows you to cleanly uninstall it if you no longer need it.

First install all the build dependencies

sudo apt-get build-dep sed

Get the source and extract

cd

wget ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/sed/sed-4.7.tar.xz

tar xf sed-4.7.tar.xz

rm sed-4.7.tar.xz    # optional

cd sed-4.7

Configure, build and install. Note the --program-suffix parameter to configure, which tells the build system to append 47 to the name of all executables.

./configure --program-suffix=47

make

sudo make install

You can now use the new sed with the command sed47, consult its manual page with man sed47, etc. When/if you want to uninstall it, do

cd ~/sed-4.7

sudo make uninstall

If you have deleted the sed-4.7 directory, you can recreate it by repeating the installation instructions above (at least up to make).

If you want to use it as your "main" version of sed, you can create an alias:

alias sed=sed47

In this case I recommend subscribing to the info-gnu mailing list to get announcements about new releases, which may contain important bug fixes.

The sed application is not comprehensive, so you can
get version 4.5 from Ubuntu 18.10 (cosmic) repository.

Usually this method is not recommended, but you can proceed if you are sure (you will not get security updates for this package installed this way):

wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/main/s/sed/sed_4.5-1_amd64.deb

sudo apt-get install ./sed_4.5-1_amd64.deb

As the result this packages will be listed as locally installed.