Shell Programming and Scripting

Simply, I have a directory of text files and I need to delete every line in every file containing a specific string. I want to write the modified files to an empty sub directory.

I can't seem to get the sed command to delete the lines containing the string, and not just the string, in other words, not sed '/*string*/d', which doesn't seem to work. I am also not sure how to accumulate the list of input file names and create the output file names. I usually use sed on specific files, so I'm not sure how to process an entire directory. I seem to remember that you can use grep to create a list of filenames, and then process the list, os something like that.

LMHmedchem

Code:

string='text pattern'
cd /path/to/files
grep -l  "$string" * |
while read fname 
do
    sed "/$string/d"  $fname > tmp.tmp
    mv tmp.tmp $fname
    mv $fname ./subdirectory/$fname 
done

Start with that.

Thanks, the second move command seems redundant. It seems as if the first mv will overwrite the original file, and then the second will move it. I probably want to keep the original file, so it looks like I could just do,
sed "/$string/d" $fname > tmp.tmp
mv tmp.tmp ./subdirectory/$fname

Does that look right?

This one of the lines I am trying to delete,
_D: "trichlormethiazide" "V" 0.683893
where the string is trichlormethiazide

LMHmedchem

---------- Post updated at 04:34 PM ---------- Previous update was at 04:12 PM ----------

That works great, thanks.

Just for clarification, grep is returning only files that contain the value of $string, correct?

Yes. It's returning the names of the files that contain "$string".

No biggie, perhaps, but I would put quotes around $fname (i.e. "$fname"), should your $string contain spaces..