Shell Programming and Scripting

Hello,

I apologize for asking what is probably a simple question but I have been unable to understand the other posts on the topic. I have a file that has the following several lines:

ABC DEF GH:IJKLMNOP_QRS_TUV_11112012_ABCL5
ABC DEF GH:IJKLMNOP_QRS_TUV_11112013_ABCL4
ABC DEF GH:IJKLMNOP_QRS_TUV_11112014_ABCL3
ABC DEF GH:IJKLMNOP_QRS_TUV_11112015_ABDL2
ABC DEF GH:IJKLMNOP_QRS_TUV_11112016_ABDL1

I would like to change all these lines to be the exact same thing that looks something like this:

ABC DEF GH:IJKLMNOP_QRS_TUV

I've been trying to use combinations of . * /\ in sed to get it to work to no avail. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Moderator's Comments:

Please view this code tag video for how to use code tags when posting code and data.

What have you tried which is not working?

Code:

sed -i 's/GH:IJKLMNOP_QRS_TUV\/*$/GH:IJKLMNOP_QRS_TUV/g' file.txt

If your requirement is just to replace ALL lines by the string "ABC DEF GH:IJKLMNOP_QRS_TUV", then the following is best suited for the job:

Code:

sed 's/.*/ABC DEF GH:IJKLMNOP_QRS_TUV/' inputfile

But, if your replacement string is dependent on the input, you'll need to do something else. Looking at your input and expected output, it looks like you need to strip off the characters after "TUV" (or the last 2 fields delimited by the underscores, including the 2 underscores). The following would serve your purpose:

Code:

sed 's/\(.*\)\(_[^_]*\)\{2\}$/\1/' inputfile

Thanks - I modified that a bit and it appears to be doing the job nicely. Thanks again!