Using sed to split a string with a delimiter

To split a string with a delimiter with GNU sed you say:

sed 's/delimiter/\n/g'     # GNU sed

For example, to split using : as a delimiter:

$ sed 's/:/\n/g' <<< "he:llo:you"
he
llo
you

Or with a non-GNU sed:

$ sed $'s/:/\\\n/g' <<< "he:llo:you"
he
llo
you

---

In this particular case, you missed the g after the substitution. Hence, it is just done once. See:

$ echo "string1:string2:string3:string4:string5" | sed s/:/\\n/g
string1
string2
string3
string4
string5

g stands for global and means that the substitution has to be done globally, that is, for any occurrence. See that the default is 1 and if you put for example 2, it is done 2 times, etc.

All together, in your case you would need to use:

sed 's/:/\\n/g' ~/Desktop/myfile.txt

Note that you can directly use the sed ... file syntax, instead of unnecessary piping: cat file | sed.

Using \n in sed is non-portable. The portable way to do what you want with sed is:

sed 's/:/\
/g' ~/Desktop/myfile.txt

but in reality this isn't a job for sed anyway, it's the job tr was created to do:

tr ':' '
' < ~/Desktop/myfile.txt