Shell Programming and Scripting

Hello Friend,

I have the followint command to delete 4th field and move forward. Can I delete all filed and just remain the first 2?
sed -e "/^[ ]*<Number/s/\([^ ]\) \([^ ]\)/\1\2/g" -e "/^[ ]*<Number/s/\([0-9][0-9][0-9]\)./\1/" -e "/^[ ]*<Number/s/\([0-9][0-9]\)/\1 /g" -e "/^[ ]*<Number/s/0</</" file

input
<Number>00000000<Number>
<Number>0123456<Number>
<Number>4403459411<Number>

output
<Number>00<Number>
<Number>01<Number>
<Number>44<Number>

Code:

sed -e "s/\(<[^>]*>..\)[^<]*\(<[^>]*>\)/\1\2/g" file

If you believe in 'beauty in brevity'

Code:

sed -e "s/\(>..\)[^<]*/\1/g" file

thx, but the file have many different fileds should as <customer>, <price>, etc
I ONLY need to do <Number>, how your settlement work for this?

Then it becomes much simpler

Code:

sed -e "s/\(<Number>..\).*\(<Number>\)/\1\2/g" file

Code:

awk '
    { if  (match($0,"<Number>")){
            print substr($0,0,RLENGTH) substr($0,RLENGTH+1,2)"<Number>"           
      }
    }' "file"

Thanks all. It work.