I did a search but couldn't find a thread that seemed to answer this but my apologies if it has been answered before.

I have some text files and I need to remove any line that does not start with a number (0-9). In actuality every line like this starts with a 'T' (or 't') but there are a varying number of spaces from the start of the line to the first t.

Ex: ' Track 9, .....'
or
' t x y q.....'

Is there a sed or grep expression I can use to delete these lines?


Thanks in advance for any help.

How about

grep "^[0-9]" infile > outfile

sed '/^ *[^0-9]/d' myFile

Wow, thanks for the 2 quick responses.

I tried both and wound up with blank output files. Looking back at the original file, every numeric line has 2 spaces before the numbers start....is it possible to add that into the expression? I looked for how to represent a space in regular expressions but came up with 8 or 9 different syntax...

P.S. I don't think I've ever seen the true value of consistently formatted files but I sure do now.

P.P.S. Again thanks for the help.

sorry:

sed -n '/^ *[0-9]/p' myFile

Thanks! It even had the added benefit of skipping blank lines, you guys are great.