Shell Programming and Scripting

Can anyone please help me on this.

i have a file with lines say

X X3200 X
X X
X2400 X X4100

I want to use sed to put the numbers in braces.
the output should be like,

X X(3200) X
X X
X(2400) X X(4100)

Code:

sed -e 's/\([0-9]\+\)/(\1)/g'

Can you pls explain ur code???? especially the usage of +\ and (\1)

TIA

this code is not working. anyways thanks for the reply

What exactly do you mean with "It's not working"? Does sed display an error, or does it not do what you want? If the latter, what should it do? I'm getting (for your sample input)

Code:

$ cat test.txt
X X3200 X
X X
X2400 X X4100
$ sed -e 's/\([0-9]\+\)/(\1)/g' test.txt > test2.txt
$ cat test2.txt
X X(3200) X
X X
X(2400) X X(4100)
$

Explanation: it's a regex. the '\(\)' tells sed to start/end a capturing group (without the backslash it would treat them as literals), capturing all digits that occur one or more times consecutively (\+, same rule as for the parentheses). In the substitution, \1 refers to the contents of the first capturing group, which is to be enclosed by (). The 'g' at the end means "global", so sed will check the entire line instead of stopping after the first occurrence.

I tried this command in my system and its not recognising the \+\ .
the output file remains unaltered.its not capturing one or more digits.
if i use just [0-9] its working on a single digit. ex
X X(3)200 X

can u plz solve this problem.i dunno wats wrong with this.

Ok, then this will probably not be solvable with sed, except when your numbers have a fixed length (eg. always 4 numbers, as in your example). In this case you'll only have to repeat [0-9] as often as there are numbers.

For a more flexible approach, try this

Code:

$ perl -i.bak -p -e 's/(\d+)/($1)/g' infile

This will make a backup copy named infile.bak and change your file in-place.