Shell Programming and Scripting

I'd appreciate the help and explaining "which each switch/command does. Thanks in advance.

Code:

1742@3min# ./fmtopo|grep serial
hc://:product-id=SUNW,Sun-Blade-2500:server-id=c3admin:serial=130B58E3146/motherboard=0/cpu=0

Code:

./fmtopo | sed -n 's#.*serial=\([^/]*\)/.*#\1#p'

firstly we use -n to replace the use of grep. this way we print only lines we give print command. since I use a / in the command I used # as my command delimiter (you can use any character). "s" is for substitution. we substitute that regex, which actually matches the entire line but has a back reference (the black-slashed parenthesizes) which is referenced as \1 in the replacement part of the substitution command. then finally the "p" will print that line, and that line only.

Thank you very much, neutron scott. I genuinely appreciate your knowledge and time.