Hello era / unix gurus,

I tried the following:
sed -e "x;/^AAA/b" -e "/^BBB/b" -e d number.dat

It works. But I need to divert it to different files .How do I do it. Kindly assist if possible

Thanks and Regards,
Vinay

Did you try the script I posted above? If so, what's wrong with it? It writes lines matching "^AAA" to AAA.dat and lines matching the regular expression "^BBB" to BBB.dat, is that not what you want?

Hello era,

The script u had sent did not work.
Its giving an error
sed: command garbled: /^AAA/wAAA.dat/^BBB/wBBB.dat

That is why I tried
sed -e "x;/^AAA/b" -e "/^BBB/b" -e d number.dat
I am getting answer properly, but I dont know how to route it to different files.

The script should be on two different lines. You could also try

The sed w command takes a file name to write the line to.

Hi era,
sed -e '/^AAA/w AAA.dat' -e '/^BBB/w BBB.dat' number.dat works..
Thanks a lot.
Can I specify the path where it should be stored:
sed -e '/^AAA/w /export/home/vinay/AAA1.dat' -e '/^BBB/w /export/home/vinay/BBB1.dat' a.dat
I hope there is some error

Also does sed provides a way to search specific fields, like the -f1 (1st field) option

Also does the sed -e '/^AAA/w AAA.dat' -e '/^BBB/w BBB.dat' number.dat traverses through the number.dat once or twice.

.. Kindly assist me if possible
Thanks and Regards,
Vinay

sed uses regular expressions only, you can create a regex to look at the first field only with regex constructs; the ^ is already halfway there, as it forces the match to happen at beginning of line. Suppose the field separator is a vertical bar; then you can just add that after the string you want to search for, to anchor it properly.

This finds "AAA" followed by vertical bar, but only if it is at beginning of line (because of the ^) and ditto for "BBB".

The vertical bar has special meaning to some regular expression engines, just like the ^ -- if you get erratic behavior (all lines matching all the time) then you need to backslash-quote it, like \|. It is unfortunate that there are different dialects of sed so that we can't know for sure whether or not this is an issue in your case.

Hello era / unix gurus,

I tried the above script but its giving me
sed: command garbled: /^AAA \|/w/export/home/cmohanku/vinay/AAA1.dat

"Also does the sed -e '/^AAA/w AAA.dat' -e '/^BBB/w BBB.dat' number.dat traverses through the number.dat once or twice."


Please help me if possible

Thanks and Regards,
Vinay