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Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting How to replace all but the first 3 characters with sed? Post 302934410 by leolson on Friday 6th of February 2015 05:39:55 PM
Old 02-06-2015
Question How to replace all but the first 3 characters with sed?

This seems like it should be an easy problem, but for some reason I am struggling with the solution.
I simply want to replace all characters after the first 3 characters with another character, preferably with sed.
Thanks in advance.

Like this, but producing the proper number of *'s:
Code:
sed "s/\(.\{3\}\).*/\1*****/"

Input:
Code:
abababab
cdcdcdcdcd
efefefefe

Output:
Code:
aba*****
cdc*******
efe******

 

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TR(1)							      General Commands Manual							     TR(1)

NAME
tr - translate characters SYNOPSIS
tr [ -cds ] [ string1 [ string2 ] ] DESCRIPTION
Tr copies the standard input to the standard output with substitution or deletion of selected characters (runes). Input characters found in string1 are mapped into the corresponding characters of string2. When string2 is short it is padded to the length of string1 by dupli- cating its last character. Any combination of the options -cds may be used: -c Complement string1: replace it with a lexicographically ordered list of all other characters. -d Delete from input all characters in string1. -s Squeeze repeated output characters that occur in string2 to single characters. In either string a noninitial sequence -x, where x is any character (possibly quoted), stands for a range of characters: a possibly empty sequence of codes running from the successor of the previous code up through the code for x. The character followed by 1, 2 or 3 octal digits stands for the character whose 16-bit value is given by those digits. The character sequence followed by 1, 2, 3, or 4 hexadecimal digits stands for the character whose 16-bit value is given by those digits. A followed by any other character stands for that character. EXAMPLES
Replace all upper-case ASCII letters by lower-case. tr A-Z a-z <mixed >lower Create a list of all the words in one per line in where a word is taken to be a maximal string of alphabetics. String2 is given as a quoted newline. tr -cs A-Za-z ' ' <file1 >file2 SOURCE
/sys/src/cmd/tr.c SEE ALSO
sed(1) TR(1)
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