SED Command to remove first digits and spaces of each line

Question

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.

If you don't absolutely need sed you can try with grep -o '[0-9]+Y' — Aserre
– Aserre, Commented Jun 27, 2014 at 14:35
@SandeepDongapure since you are back in the site, you can consider accepting an answer here as well! — fedorqui
– fedorqui, Commented Mar 19, 2015 at 12:27

toftis · Accepted Answer · 2014-06-27 14:57:31Z

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

Note that \+ is a documented GNU extension, and \s seems to be an undocumented one, as far as I can tell. They may not work with other versions of sed.

Avinash Raj · Accepted Answer · 2014-06-27 14:40:34Z

0

Your sed command would be,

sed 's/.* //g' file

This would remove the first numbers along with the space followed.

edited Jun 27, 2014 at 14:40

answered Jun 27, 2014 at 14:35

Avinash Raj

175k32 gold badges247 silver badges289 bronze badges

2 Comments

Tom Zych Over a year ago

No, that greedily matches everything before the last space, plus the space.

Tom Zych Over a year ago

Right, sorry, it would work with this data, because there are only two fields. Not as robust as it could be, though.

Tom Zych · Accepted Answer · 2014-06-27 14:42:08Z

0

Remove leading digits, then following spaces:

sed 's/^[0-9]* *//' file

edited Jun 27, 2014 at 14:42

answered Jun 27, 2014 at 14:36

Tom Zych

13.7k9 gold badges38 silver badges55 bronze badges

Comments

dvk317960 · Accepted Answer · 2014-06-27 16:45:24Z

0

sed 's/^[0-9]*[ ]*//g' input.txt

answered Jun 27, 2014 at 16:45

dvk317960

8227 silver badges11 bronze badges

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

SED Command to remove first digits and spaces of each line

4 Answers 4

1 Comment

2 Comments

Comments

Comments

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

4 Answers 4

1 Comment

2 Comments

Comments

Comments

Related