Shell Programming and Scripting

Hai masters,

If a file contains content of 2000 lines,
from which i need to remove the first n characters or first n spaces from each line of the file.

If suppose to remove n characters or first n spaces from a single line means, just use the command nx.

But from the above scenario, how we need to get the solution..

Thanks & Regards,
Arun

Hi
To replace the first n characters or spaces in the beginning of each line, you can use the command sed

Example:

PHP Code:

sed 's/^   /zzz/g' ./test.log > test1.log 


By this command, you will be able to substitute the first three spaces of each line by the string zzz.

Regards

@Hammadi dali,

No man, its not working..
See
Yes by using your script,
E.g
echo " sdfsdf" | sed 's/^ /zzz/g'

Then the o/p is zzzsdfsdf.

But for example if a file contains content as follows,
181 last
182 first
183 begin
184 apropos lst
185 lstat
186 stat
187 apropos last
188 lastcomm
189 dir
190 lastcomm
191 lastlog
192 errno
193 last


Now i want to remove first 7 characters from all the lines whether it is space or number.

I tried this one
sed -e "s/.//1" -e "s/.//1" -e "s/.//1" -e "s/.//1" -e "s/.//1" -e "s/.//1" -e "s/.//1" linuxcommands.sql >xxx.sql

The above command replaces first 7 characters from all the lines of the file..
But still i am thinking to achieve this in some other way.

If u came to know some other process to arrive at this solution means,
Reply me.

try the cut command

An example to remove 2 leading spaces with sed:

Code:

sed 's/^ \{2\}//' file

Regards

Hai Franklin,

Fine...
Its working for replacing the spaces..
Is it possible to remove the leading n characters frm all the lines
Note: n characters may be spaces or number or characters.

Also i posted an example in the above posts...

This prints the lines from the 3th position (deletes the 1st 3 characters of a line):

Code:

sed 's/...//' file

With awk you can use the substr() function:

Code:

awk '{print substr($0, 3}' file

Regards