06-01-2005
Instead of searching for the delimiters do it the other way round: Search for what you are interested in, everything else would be a delimiter.
With this in mind, suppose, for example, the text you are looking for are always letters (or letters and digits, or only uppercase letters, etc.). In this case you could use the following line:
# sed 's/^\([A-Za-z][A-Za-z]*\).*$/\1/' <source> > <target>
This collects every letter (uppercase or lowercase) starting at the beginning of the line to the sed variable "\1" until a non-letter is reached. The remainder of the line is snipped off then and the variables content put out.
If the text you are looking for can be further limited change the char classes in the regular expression above. For example, if you only look for uppercase letters, you could write "[A-Z][A-Z]*" above.
bakunin
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LEARN ABOUT ULTRIX
escape
escape(1) Mail Avenger 0.8.3 escape(1)
NAME
escape - escape shell special characters in a string
SYNOPSIS
escape string
DESCRIPTION
escape prepends a "" character to all shell special characters in string, making it safe to compose a shell command with the result.
EXAMPLES
The following is a contrived example showing how one can unintentionally end up executing the contents of a string:
$ var='; echo gotcha!'
$ eval echo hi $var
hi
gotcha!
$
Using escape, one can avoid executing the contents of $var:
$ eval echo hi `escape "$var"`
hi ; echo gotcha!
$
A less contrived example is passing arguments to Mail Avenger bodytest commands containing possibly unsafe environment variables. For
example, you might write a hypothetical reject_bcc script to reject mail not explicitly addressed to the recipient:
#!/bin/sh
formail -x to -x cc -x resent-to -x resent-cc
| fgrep "$1" > /dev/null
&& exit 0
echo "<$1>.. address does not accept blind carbon copies"
exit 100
To invoke this script, passing it the recipient address as an argument, you would need to put the following in your Mail Avenger rcpt
script:
bodytest reject_bcc `escape "$RECIPIENT"`
SEE ALSO
avenger(1),
The Mail Avenger home page: <http://www.mailavenger.org/>.
BUGS
escape is designed for the Bourne shell, which is what Mail Avenger scripts use. escape might or might not work with other shells.
AUTHOR
David Mazieres
Mail Avenger 0.8.3 2012-04-05 escape(1)