UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Sorry for the title, I really don't know how to word this question or what to even search for. I tried "grep one match", "grep 1 match", "stop grep" on both google and here and haven't found something that helps, so here I go:

I have a file that's about 1.5 million lines long, every line looks like this

"name" "data data data data" "timestamp" "id"

Where each of the fields wrapped in quotes is different every time and the quoted fields are seperated by a tab. So basically a file might look like this:

"Rob" "Hello this is post 1" "06/07/09" "87124024"
"Rob" "Information here" "06/08/09" "2358234"
"Rob" "Another bit of information would be here" "06/08/09" "349235"
"James" "My name is James." "06/01/09" "3942394"
"Thomas" "Go to google.com, it's great" "06/04/09" "342349"

And so on 1.5 million times.

I need to go through the file and get rid of the "name"\t part and the \t"id" part so that


"Rob" "Hello this is post 1" "06/07/09" "87124024"
"Rob" "Information here" "06/08/09" "2358234"
"Rob" "Another bit of information would be here" "06/08/09" "349235"
"James" "My name is James." "06/01/09" "3942394"
"Thomas" "Go to google.com, it's great" "06/04/09" "342349"

would look like

"Hello this is post 1" "06/07/09"
"Information here" "06/08/09"
"Another bit of information would be here" "06/08/09"
"My name is James." "06/01/09"
"Go to google.com, it's great" "06/04/09"

I tried:

^".*"\t but that goes through the "name" "data" "timestamp" fields. I have no idea how to get it to stop after the first tab and not keep going. I tried restricting it with {1} but I now realize it'll still go to the end since it's still only one tab, it's just at the end...

I'm at a loss at what to try, I've tried a dozen other terms, but none of them did what I want. I tried ^"[[:alpha:]]"\t but that won't work since the name might have numbers or symbols in it.

Any suggestions? Any help would be appreciated.

First, for future reference, please put anything that requires fixed width display (formated input, code, formated output) between [code][/code] tags (it's the '#' symbol in the button bar above the editor)

Looks like you don't want grep but awk:

Code:

$ cat input.txt
"Rob"   "Hello this is post 1"  "06/07/09"      "87124024"
"Rob"   "Information here"      "06/08/09"      "2358234"
"Rob"   "Another bit of information would be here"      "06/08/09"      "349235"
"James" "My name is James."     "06/01/09"      "3942394"
"Thomas"        "Go to google.com, it's great"  "06/04/09"      "342349"
$ awk -F"\t" '{print $2"\t"$3}' input.txt
"Hello this is post 1"  "06/07/09"
"Information here"      "06/08/09"
"Another bit of information would be here"      "06/08/09"
"My name is James."     "06/01/09"
"Go to google.com, it's great"  "06/04/09"

Never heard of awk before, but thanks for the help. It worked perfectly!

you can use cut two. If you only have four fields you can cut out only the 2nd an 3rd fields using something like

Code:

cut -f2-3 $yourinputfile