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Replacing certain positions in lines with spaces

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# 1  
Old 10-06-2017
Replacing certain positions in lines with spaces
Hello,

I have a file with hundreds of lines. Now I need to replace positions 750-766 in each line (whatever there is there) with spaces... how can I do that?

Which command to use?

The result will be all the lines in the file will have spaces in positions 750-766.

Thanks!
# 2  
Old 10-06-2017
Try
Code:
sed 's/\(.\{749\}\).\{17\}/\1                 /' file

# 3  
Old 10-09-2017
why 749 when I wanted 750-766?

and after I pasted the command is says:
"cannot be parsed."

Any suggestions?

Thanks.
# 4  
Old 10-09-2017
Quote:
Originally Posted by netrom
and after I pasted the command is says:
"cannot be parsed."
Not sure why, the command seems to be correct. What is your OS and version?

Quote:
Originally Posted by netrom
why 749 when I wanted 750-766?
Good question: when you want to change "from position 750" that means that the first 749 characters in the line should go unchanged. What RudiC does is to read each line up to character 766 in two parts: the first 749 characters and then 17 characters. The first part is then put to output unchanged (the "\1", which is a so-called "back-reference"), the second part is replaced by 17 blanks.

I hope this helps.

bakunin
This User Gave Thanks to bakunin For This Post:
RudiC
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