Shell Programming and Scripting

I have a script that produces an output containing '/.ssh'.

I am trying to find a way of parsing only this data from a single line, without removing any other special characters contained within the output as a result of the parse.

Any help would be appreciated

It is unclear what you mean by 'parsing only this data from a single line'. If it is a single instance within a file and you simply want to remove it the following will work.

Code:

sed 's/\/\.ssh//' file

I don't understand what special characters you expect to find in the string "/.ssh", or why you need to parse it from a file instead of just giving your program the string "/.ssh" in the first place.

Apologies, '/.ssh'. is displayed at the start of the output i've parsed.

The output is generated by an Expect script SSHing to an external server and Grepping a file for data

It is then called via a PHP web interface, and when the data is called, the first line has '/.ssh'. at the start.

I need a way of parsing '/.ssh'. from the initial line of the output, while not affecting the rest of the output

I hope this is clearer,

@fpmurphy: sed 's/\/\.ssh//' seems to be on the right tracks, however leaves me with ''.

Cheers,

Ah, you just need to remove the very first line?

Code:

( read ; cat )

read will eat the first line, and cat will just copy the rest to stdout.

Ideally I'd like to keep the first line of the output as sometimes the data from the Grep will only contain 1 line

Any further help would be appreciated.

So you want to check what the first line is, without actually altering any of the data?