How do I replace : characters with newline?

Question

I looked at a very similar question but was unable to resolve the issue Replace comma with newline in sed

I am trying to convert : characters in a strin

Answer 1

You do not need echo -e because you have \n in sed, not in echo statement. So, the following should work (note that I have changed '\n' to \n):

echo -e 'this:is:a:test' | sed "s/\:/\n/g"

or

echo  'this:is:a:test' | sed "s/\:/\n/g"

Also note that you do not need to escape : so the following will work too (thanks to @anishsane)

echo  'this:is:a:test' | sed "s/:/\n/g"

Below is just to reiterate why you need -e for echo

$ echo -e "hello \n"
hello

$ echo  "hello \n"
hello \n