I have a file containing a lot of SQL statements, such as: CREATE TABLE "USER" ( "ID" INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, "NAME" CHARACTER VARYING(50) NOT NULL, "AGE" INTEGER NOT NULL ); COPY "USER" (id, name, age) FROM stdin; 1 Skywalker 19 2 Kenobi 57 I want the column names in the COPY statements to be uppercased and quoted: COPY "USER" ("ID", "NAME", "AGE") FROM stdin; Using sed, I found the following regexp: sed -r 's/([( ])(\w+)([,)])/\1"\U\2\E"\3/g' It does replace the column names, but it is not selective enough, and replaces other words in the file: ~/test]$sed -r 's/([( ])(\w+)([,)])/\1"\U\2\E"\3/g' star_wars_example CREATE TABLE "USER" ( "ID" INTEGER PRIMARY "KEY", "NAME" CHARACTER VARYING("50")NOT "NULL", "AGE" INTEGER NOT NULL ); COPY "USER" ("ID", "NAME", "AGE") FROM stdin; 1 Skywalker 19 2 Kenobi 57 To avoid this problem, I want sed to only apply my regexp to the lines starting with COPY and ending with FROM stdin;. I have looked into lookahead / lookbehind, but they are not supported in sed. They seem to be supported in super-sed, but I am currently using Cygwin (Windows is mandatory here...) and it does not seem available in the package list. Is there a way to force sed to only consider specific line? I've considered piping my file through grep before applying sed, but other lines will then disappear from the output. Am I missing something obvious? It would be great if the answer was easily applicable on a default Cygwin install. I guess I could try installing super-sed on cygwin, but I'd like to know if there are more obvious ideas