UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

You could even leave out the start/end markers:

Code:

sed 's/.*\(..:..:..\).*/\1/'

Since the : are sufficient as anchors...

Yeah, sure there are plenty of ways to get the time from date. My problem was that I did not know that sed treads + and { primarily as a normal character and not as a regex.

Maybe we should start an offtopic thread with all ways to extract the time from `date` with *nix like systems or even all kind of OS

First of all welcome to this forum.

There was another, more important problem with your sed attempts and that was the greediness of sed, as ctsgnb pointed out. My post was related to that and made a point about anchoring the regex. It was perhaps primarily meant for ctsgnb, but it may be of use to you too, so I reckon it certainly is related to this thread and it is not off topic. Please also note that this is not "your" thread as the OP. A thread may be of use to you as the OP, to those who participate, to anyone who reads along and to those who use it as a reference or land there as the result of a query.

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Further, it is not so much that sed treats + and {} as normal characters. It is that modern sed adheres to POSIX BRE (Basic Regular Expressions) and as such curly brackets need to be escaped, but + is not even supported. Only GNU sed has an extension that supports it as \+ .

If you wish to use ERE (Extended Regular Expressions) you can use GNU sed with the -r option and then + and {} can be used without the escape, since { and + are part of ERE.