Shell Programming and Scripting

Dear all,
I have a database of compound words. I want to retain only strings with a single hyphen and identify those strings which have more than one hyphen. I am giving an example below

Code:

test-test
test-test-test
test-test-test-test-test
good-for-nothing

The regex/script should remove all strings which have more than one hyphen as shown in the example below where a string separated by a single hyphen alone is retained

Code:

test-test

A Perl regex or an Awk or Perl script would be of great help.
Thanks in advance

Moderator's Comments:

Please use CODE tags for sample input, sample output, and code segments (not HTML tags).

If you're trying to print lines that contain less than two hyphens, try:

Code:

awk 'gsub(/-/, "-") < 2' file

If you're trying to just print lines that contain exactly one hyphen, try:

Code:

awk 'gsub(/-/, "-") == 1' file

If you want to try this on a Solaris/SunOS system, change awk to /usr/xpg4/bin/awk or nawk.

Many thanks. it worked. I replaced the

Code:

' by "
in
gsub(/-/, "-') == 1

and it zipped through a huge file of over 50,000+ compounds
As a matter of curiosity was a single apostrophe a typo? I work in a DOS environment and was this the reason?

Yes, it was a typo. I will edit post #2 to fix the typos.

Thanks a lot for your kind help

Using awk's field splitting

Code:

awk -F- 'NF==2'

Thanks. This solution also worked. I have stored it as a backup.