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sed to remove 1st two characters every line of text file

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# 8  
Old 10-29-2008
Quote:
Originally Posted by ajp7701
thank you all! I'll probably make a new post, but I actually need the last two characters removed also....

Code:
sed -e 's/^..//' -e 's/..$//' file1.txt > file2.txt

# 9  
Old 06-03-2009
Quote:
Originally Posted by ajp7701
what is the sed command to remove the first two characters of every line of a text file?
each line of the text file has the same amount of characters, and they are ALL NUMERIC. there are hundreds of lines though.
for example,

>cat file1.txt
10081551
10081599
10082234
10082259
20081134
20081159
30082232
10087721
>

I want the end result to remove the first two digits of each line

>cat file2.txt
081551
081599
082234
082259
081134
081159
082232
087721
>

Thank you so much!!
How could I do the same as ajp7701 but instead of deleting the first two characters of every line, I want to delete the last two characters of every line? E.g:

Before:

>cat file1.txt
10081551
10081599
10082234


After:

>cat file2.txt
100815
100815
100822
# 10  
Old 06-03-2009
Quote:
Originally Posted by lewk
I want to delete the last two characters of every line?

See my previous post. The first command removes the first two, the second removes the last two.
# 11  
Old 06-04-2009
Quote:
Originally Posted by cfajohnson

See my previous post. The first command removes the first two, the second removes the last two.
ahh, I missed that. Thanks so much. I really need to sharpen up my shell skills.
# 12  
Old 06-04-2009
diferent and simple solucion
This is not a sed command, but it works also. Try it.

cut -c1-6 file_name |cut -c3-6

This will remove the first 2 and last 2 characters of the datas in the file

Best Regards
Last edited by Alexis Duarte; 06-04-2009 at 03:18 PM..
# 13  
Old 06-04-2009
Quote:
Originally Posted by Alexis Duarte
This is not a sed command, but it works also. Try it.

cut -c1-6 file_name |cut -c3-6

Why two cuts? That's the same as:

Code:
cut -c3-6 file_name

Quote:
This will remove the first 2 and last 2 characters of the datas in the file

Only if all the lines are exactly 8 characters long. The sed command will work on any length, or even variable length lines.
# 14  
Old 06-05-2009
Quote:
Originally Posted by cfajohnson

Why two cuts? That's the same as:

Code:
cut -c3-6 file_name


Only if all the lines are exactly 8 characters long. The sed command will work on any length, or even variable length lines.
The sed command working on any length/variable length lines is exactly what I looked for. Thx
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