Thank you. That is a good start.

We now know that your input looks like what you described in post #1 in this thread and that it does not look like what you described on post #10 (where there were 20 fields and two of those fields were to be changed) and it does not look like what you described in post #13 (where there were 4 fields and absolutely nothing was supposed to be changed) and it does not like what you described in post #17 update 1 (where there were 16 fields).

In addition to the number of fields changing, your description of what characters are to be considered "special" seems to vary from post to post.

If what you want to do is:then the following command should do what you want:

Code:

sed 's/[^ [:digit:]]*$//' file

This will not be sufficient if any other field is to be modified and it will not be sufficient if any other character is not to be treated as special.

Since you still have not shown us what output you hope to produce from the above sample input, we have no way of knowing which of your many different statements about what changes are to be made is the correct set of requirements. The above code produces the output:

Code:

XXXX99999999|x99999999999|999999999|X|X|99999999|99999999|X|99999999|99999999|99999999|9999999  999999|||X 
XXXX99999999|X99999999999|999999999|X|X|99999999|99999999|X|99999999|99999999|99999999|||X 
XXXX99999999|X99999999999|9999999999999|X|X|99999999|99999999|X|99999999|99999999|99999999||||X 
XXXX99999999|X99999999999|999999999|X|X|99999999|99999999|X|99999999|99999999|99999999||||X 
XXXX99999999|X9999999999999|999999999|X|X|99999999|99999999|X|99999999|99999999|99999999||||X

Note that the above output include a single <space> character at the end of each line.