I stumbled on the same issue when playing with Maven pom files and it seems to be a feature of xmlstarlet:
http://xmlstar.sourceforge.net/doc/UG/ch05s01.html If the document has a default namespace it has to be specified explicitly with the -N option and then prefixed to the name of the elements in the XPath expression: xmlstarlet sel -N xhtml=http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml -T -t -c '//xhtml:h3[@id="baz"]' -n test2.xml This is rather annoying and the default namespace should probably be ignored, but at least there is a workaround. Emmanuel Bourg
