It is often recommended to enclose capital letters in a BibTeX file in braces, so the letters will not be transformed to lower case, when imported from LaTeX. This is an attempt to apply this rule to a BibTeX database file. DO NOT USE sed '...' input.bib > input.bib as it will empty the file! How it works: /^\s*[^@%]/ Apply the search-and-replace rule to lines that start (^) with zero or more white spaces (\s*), followed by any character ([...]) that is *NOT* a "@" or a "%" (^@%). s=<some stuff>=<other stuff>=g Search (s) for some stuff and replace by other stuff. Do that globally (g) for all matches in each processed line. \([A-Z][A-Z]*\)\([^}A-Z]\|},$\) Matches at least one uppercase letter ([A-Z][A-Z]*) followed by a character that is EITHER not "}" and not a capital letter ([^}A-Z]) OR (|) it actually IS a "}", which is followed by "," at the end of the line ($). Putting regular expressions in escaped parentheses (\( and \), respectively) allows to dereference the matched string later. {\1}\2 Replace the matched string by "{", followed by part 1 of the matched string (\1), followed by "}", followed by the second part of the matched string (\2). I tried this with GNU sed, only, version 4.2.1. Show Sample Output

Remove lines from a bibtex file that have abstracts in them.