xmlstarlet - Man Page

command line XML/XSLT toolkit

Examples (TL;DR)

Format an XML document and print to stdout: xmlstarlet format path/to/file.xml
XML document can also be piped from stdin: cat path/to/file.xml | xmlstarlet format
Print all nodes that match a given XPath: xmlstarlet select --template --copy-of xpath path/to/file.xml
Insert an attribute to all matching nodes, and print to stdout (source file is unchanged): xmlstarlet edit --insert xpath --type attr --name attribute_name --value attribute_value path/to/file.xml
Update the value of all matching nodes in place (source file is changed): xmlstarlet edit --inplace --update xpath --value new_value file.xml
Delete all matching nodes in place (source file is changed): xmlstarlet edit --inplace --delete xpath file.xml
Escape or unescape special XML characters in a given string: xmlstarlet [un]escape string
List a given directory as XML (omit argument to list current directory): xmlstarlet ls path/to/directory

Synopsis

xml [options...] {command} [cmd-options...]

XMLStarlet is a set of command line utilities (tools) which can be used to transform, query, validate, and edit XML documents and files using simple set of shell commands in similar way it is done for plain text files using UNIX grep, sed, awk, diff, patch, join, etc commands. This set of command line utilities can be used by those who deal with many XML documents on UNIX shell command prompt as well as for automated XML processing with shell scripts.