Delete line with specific number of characters - sed

I have a specific file (file.txt) with several lines.
How is it possible to delete all lines that do not have 12 characters, using sed?

Use an interval expression to specify the exact number of characters you want to match between the beginning (^) and end ($) of the input record.
sed '/^.\{12\}$/!d' file

Not sure why you would use sed. This is much cleaner in awk:
awk 'length == 12' file.txt

Related

SED command to remove words at the end of the string

I want to remove last 2 words in the string which is in a file.
I am using this command first to delete the last word. But I couldn't do it. can someone help me
sed 's/\w*$//' <file name>
my strings are like this
Input:
asbc/jahsf/jhdsflk/jsfh/ -0.001 (exam)
I want to remove both numerical value and the one in brackets.
Output:
asbc/jahsf/jhdsflk/jsfh/
Using GNU sed:
$ sed -r 's/([[:space:]]+[-+.()[:alnum:]]+){2}$//' file
asbc/jahsf/jhdsflk/jsfh/
How it works
[[:space:]]+ matches one or more spaces.
[-+.()[:alnum:]]+ matches the 'words' which are allowed to contain any number of plus or minus signs, periods, parens, or any alphanumeric characters.
Note that, when a period is inside square brackets, [.], it is just a period, not a wildcard: it does not need to be escaped.
([[:space:]]+[-+.()[:alnum:]]+) matches one or more spaces followed by a word.
([[:space:]]+[-+.()[:alnum:]]+){2}$ matches two words and the spaces which precede them.
Note the use of character classes like [:space:] and [:alnum:]. Unlike the old-fashioned classes like [a-zA-Z0-9], these classes are unicode safe.
OSX (BSD) sed
The above was tested on GNU sed. For BSD sed, try:
sed -E 's/([[:space:]][[:space:]]*[-+.()[:alnum:][:alnum:]]*){2}$//' file
To remove everything that follows a number with decimal places
This looks for a decimal number with optional sign and removes it, the spaces which precede it, and everything which follows it:
$ sed -r 's/[[:space:]]+[-+]?[[:digit:]]+[.][[:digit:]]+[[:space:]].*//' file
asbc/jahsf/jhdsflk/jsfh/
How it works:
[[:space:]]+ matches one or more spaces
[-+]? matches zero or one signs.
[[:digit:]]+ matches any number of digits.
[.] matches a decimal point (period).
[[:digit:]]+ matches one or more digits following the decimal point.
[[:space:]] matches a space following the number.
.* matches anything which follows.
It looks like there is a tab between what you want to keep and what you want to get rid of. I don't have linux in front of me but try this.
sed 's/\t.*//'
This is assuming your strings are always formatted similarily which is what I take from your comment.
This might work for you (GNU sed):
sed -r 's/\s+\S+\s+\S+\s*$//' file
or if you prefer:
sed -r 's/(\s+\S+){2}\s*$//' file
This matches and removes: one or more whitespaces followed by one or more non-whitespaces twice followed by zero or more whitespaces at the end of the line.

SED Command to remove first digits and spaces of each line

I have a simple text file in below format.
1 12658003Y
2 34345345N
3 34653785Y
4 36452342N
5 86747488Y
6 34634543Y
so on
10 37456338Y
11 33535555Y
12 37456378Y
so on
100 23432434Y
As you can see there are two white spaces after first number.
I'm trying to write SED command to remove the digits before whitespaces. Is there any SED command to remove spaces and number before spaces?
Output file should look like below.
12658003Y
34345345N
34653785Y
36452342N
so on..
Please assist. I'm very new to shell scripting.
sed 's/[0-9]\+\s\+//' infile > outfile
Explanation:
s: we want to use substitution
/: mark start and end of the expression we want to match
[0-9]: match any digit
+: match the previous one or more time
\s: space
+: match the previous one or more time
/: mark start of what we want to change our matches to (which is nothing)
/: some special operators goes after this (we use no such)
infile: the file we want to change
>: pipe stdout to
outfile: where we want to store output
Your sed command would be,
sed 's/.* //g' file
This would remove the first numbers along with the space followed.
Remove leading digits, then following spaces:
sed 's/^[0-9]* *//' file
sed 's/^[0-9]*[ ]*//g' input.txt

Matching strings even if they start with white spaces in SED

I'm having issues matching strings even if they start with any number of white spaces. It's been very little time since I started using regular expressions, so I need some help
Here is an example. I have a file (file.txt) that contains two lines
#String1='Test One'
String1='Test Two'
Im trying to change the value for the second line, without affecting line 1 so I used this
sed -i "s|String1=.*$|String1='Test Three'|g"
This changes the values for both lines. How can I make sed change only the value of the second string?
Thank you
With gnu sed, you match spaces using \s, while other sed implementations usually work with the [[:space:]] character class. So, pick one of these:
sed 's/^\s*AWord/AnotherWord/'
sed 's/^[[:space:]]*AWord/AnotherWord/'
Since you're using -i, I assume GNU sed. Either way, you probably shouldn't retype your word, as that introduces the chance of a typo. I'd go with:
sed -i "s/^\(\s*String1=\).*/\1'New Value'/" file
Move the \s* outside of the parens if you don't want to preserve the leading whitespace.
There are a couple of solutions you could use to go about your problem
If you want to ignore lines that begin with a comment character such as '#' you could use something like this:
sed -i "/^\s*#/! s|String1=.*$|String1='Test Three'|g" file.txt
which will only operate on lines that do not match the regular expression /.../! that begins ^ with optional whiltespace\s* followed by an octothorp #
The other option is to include the characters before 'String' as part of the substitution. Doing it this way means you'll need to capture \(...\) the group to include it in the output with \1
sed -i "s|^\(\s*\)String1=.*$|\1String1='Test Four'|g" file.txt
With GNU sed, try:
sed -i "s|^\s*String1=.*$|String1='Test Three'|" file
or
sed -i "/^\s*String1=/s/=.*/='Test Three'/" file
Using awk you could do:
awk '/String1/ && f++ {$2="Test Three"}1' FS=\' OFS=\' file
#String1='Test One'
String1='Test Three'
It will ignore first hits of string1 since f is not true.

Insert newline after pattern with changing number in sed

I want to insert a newline after the following pattern
lcl|NC_005966.1_gene_750
While the last number(in this case the 750) changes. The numbers are in a range of 1-3407.
How can I tell sed to keep this pattern together and not split them after the first number?
So far i found
sed 's/lcl|NC_005966.1_gene_[[:digit:]]/&\n/g' file
But this breaks off, after the first digit.
Try:
sed 's/lcl|NC_005966.1_gene_[[:digit:]]*/&\n/g' file
(note the *)
Alternatively, you could say:
sed '/lcl|NC_005966.1_gene_[[:digit:]]/G' file
which would add a newline after the specified pattern is encountered.
sed 's/lcl|NC_005966\.1_gene_[[:digit:]][[:digit:]]*/&\
/g' file
You need to escape . as it's an RE metacharacter, and you need [[:digit:]][[:digit:]]* to represent 1-or-more digits and you need to use \ followed by a literal newline for portability across seds.

Finding lines which are greater than 120 characters length using sed

I want to get a list of lines in a batch file which are greater than 120 characters length. For this I thought of using sed. I tried but I was not successful. How can i achieve this ?
Is there any other way to get a list other than using sed ??
Thanks..
Another way to do this using awk:
cat file | awk 'length($0) > 120'
You can use grep and its repetition quantifier:
grep '.\{120\}' script.sh
Using sed, you have some alternatives:
sed -e '/.\{120\}/!d'
sed -e '/^.\{,119\}$/d'
sed -ne '/.\{120\}/p'
The first option matches lines that don't have (at least) 120 characters (the ! after the expression is to execute the command on lines that don't match the pattern before it), and deletes them (ie. doesn't print them).
The second option matches lines that from start (^) to end ($) have a total of characters from zero to 119. These lines are also deleted.
The third option is to use the -n flag, which tells sed to not print lines by default, and only print something if we tell it to. In this case, we match lines that have (at least) 120 characters, and use p to print them.