UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

So the tag for this forum says all newbies welcome...
All I want to do is go through my file and find lines which contain a given string of characters then replace these with a blank line. I really tried to find a simple command to do this but failed.

Here's what I did come up with though:

Code:

sed -e 's/REGEXP[^ ]*/MARKER/g' -e 's/[^ ]*MARKER//g' in.txt > out.txt

So I find a REGEXP, replace that and the rest of the line with "MARKER", then I replace the start of the line, including "MARKER" with nothing, thus leaving behind a blank entry...

I think this has worked... Better method please?!

Hi Golpette,

It would easier to help if you can provide input data.

if you make the pattern space the entire line, you can do it in 1 shot.

Code:

[mute@geek /proc]$ printf '%s\n' foo bar baz | sed 's/ar//'    #we want to find "ar"
foo
b
baz
[mute@geek /proc]$ printf '%s\n' foo bar baz | sed '/ar/d'     #delete the line
foo
baz
[mute@geek /proc]$ printf '%s\n' foo bar baz | sed 's/.*ar.*//'    #replace with nothing (blank)
foo
 
baz