Originally Posted by Don Cragun

Your request is extremely vague. What do you mean by?:

Do you want to delete the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th lines in the file?
Do you want to delete the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th fields in each line in the file?
What is in the lines other than unaccented uppercase letters and unaccented lowercase letters? If the fields are separated from each other by one or more space or tab characters do you also want the space and tab characters following the fields that are being removed to be removed or do you want to leave the separators unchanged?
Do you want to only print lines that have been changed, or do you want to every line after the changes have been completed. (Your current code appears to want to print unchanged lines once and changed lines twice.)

According to the standard, the use of 2g in

Code:

s/[a-zA-Z]*//2gp

produces undefined results.
You can specify a count or the g flag, but not both.
Since you don't show us any of your input, you don't give us the output from the commands you listed, and you don't show us the output you want to get from a representative input file, any suggestions you get here will be wild conjecture as to whether or not you will get anything resembling what you want.

With the sed commands you are showing, I assume that you are trying to remove fields rather than lines, that you want to leave any field separators unchanged, and that you want to every line in the file once. In that case, something like:

Code:

sed 'sed 's/[a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z]*//14
s/[a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z]*//4
s/[a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z]*//3
s/[a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z]*//2' 9

will delete two or more letters in the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 14th nonadjacent occurrences of adjacent letters from every line. If a line has fewer occurrences of this condition, it will still make changes to any of the times the request is matched. If the input file (9) contains:

Code:

first second third fourth fifth sixth seventh eighth ninth tenth eleventh twelfth thirteenth fourteenth fifteenth sixteenth seventeenth eighteenth nineteenth twentieth
1st 2nd 3rd 4th 5th 6th 7th 8th 9th 10th

the output will be:

Code:

first    fifth sixth seventh eighth ninth tenth eleventh twelfth thirteenth  fifteenth sixteenth seventeenth eighteenth nineteenth twentieth
1st 2 3 4 5th 6th 7th 8th 9th 10th