sed works on stdin by default (see third example) so there shouldn't be a need to pipe from /dev/stdin, and line anchors should still work. $ cat myfile

sed works on stdin by default (see third example) so there shouldn't be a need to pipe from /dev/stdin, and line anchors should still work. $ cat myfile foo foo baz baz $ cat foo.sh #!/bin/sh sed 's/^foo/bar/;s/^baz/foobar/' $ ./foo.sh < myfile bar foo foobar baz Depending on your expression, you may want to use -E to get POSIX ERE syntax.