I understand that "-e" is to be used in sed to run multiple commands.

I have seeing examples of sed -e command on the web.
Some are like : -

sed -e 's/a/A/g' -e 's/b/B/g' 1.txt

where "-e" comes multiple times as "-e" is to be used to apply multiple commands on the input. In the above example we need to perform two replacements -

a with A
and
b with B

hence two "-e" are used.

But I have also seen lot of examples on the web where single "-e" is being used. Some of these are :

sed -e 's/^#.*//' f1 f2 f3 | grep -v '^$' | wc -l
sed -e '/^[ ]*$/d' InputFile >OutputFile

These examples can be used to achieve the exact same purpose even without using "-e".


Can someone explain, then why do we intend to use "-e" in such cases.
Please let me know if I am missing out something on understanding the purpose of "-e".

Thanks

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sed -e command

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