Shell Programming and Scripting

When redirecting in shell you can not redirect to the same filename. What the shell does is see > and automatically creates a new file erasing the contents before it performs work on the actual file.

hmmmm, didn't pull 'coat' out of the line

Seems like there should be some easier sed/grep&delete/awk commands to do this, but I'm not familiar, obv, with them

---------- Post updated at 02:57 PM ---------- Previous update was at 02:51 PM ----------

ah.

well it seems logical that this would do the trick, running the command on that file and not changing the output of the file:

sed 's/coat (tab) hat$/hat/' myfile

but that didn't seem to work either

Here is a example of using awk to remove any of the lines that contain the word coat.

Code:

awk -F \; ' 
{ for(x=1; x <= NF; x++){
	if(index($x,"coat") == 0 )
		printf("%s;",  $x); 
	} 
} 

END{
	printf("\n");
} ' filename.txt

while helpful, it's not what i'm trying to do.

i'm trying to search a file to find that one specific line (mentioned in the original post), remove 'coat' IF it's contained in the line, and leave the rest of the file as is.

myfile:

test text
text
coat
line 4
coat
*.cat;dog;kennel;house;barn;horse;hay;coat hat
dust
*coat coat

[ The space between coat and hat is a tab (if that matters)]

>>>>> i want to have a script that will search "myfile" for the line:

*.cat;dog;kennel;house;barn;horse;hay;coat hat

>>>> and just remove the word 'coat'. the line will be in that exact format too

[QUOTE=skunky;302476449]while helpful, it's not what i'%

---------- Post updated at 05:39 PM ---------- Previous update was at 05:25 PM ----------

Here is the code revised to suit your needs. It only removes lines that have exactly coat[tab]hat

Code:

awk -F \; ' 
{ 
	for(x=1; x <= NF; x++){
		if(index($x,"coat\that") == 0 )
			if(x == NF)
				printf("%s\n",  $x); 
			else
				printf("%s;", $x);
	} 
} ' filename.txt

[QUOTE=codecaine;302476459]
thing is, i only want the word 'coat' removed, and the line left there.......

anyone know an easy sed command to search out the line with that exact string first, and then remove the word 'coat' IF it appears in that line??

---------- Post updated 12-02-10 at 10:17 AM ---------- Previous update was 12-01-10 at 07:42 PM ----------

bump, any help on this??