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Remove words beginning with a certain character from a file

 
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# 1  
Old 11-30-2009
Remove words beginning with a certain character from a file
Hi,

how could you go about removing words that begin with a certain character.

assuming that this character is '-' I currently have

Code:
echo "-hello" | sed s/-/""/

which replaces the leading dash with nothing but I want to remove the whole word, even if there are multiple words beginning with '-'

thanks

skinny
# 2  
Old 11-30-2009
Try:
Code:
sed 's/-\w\+//'

or
Code:
sed 's/-[^[:space:]]\+//'

# 3  
Old 11-30-2009
Code:
sed 's/-\w\+//g'

works a treat Scrutinizer thank you.

Could you offer an explaination as to what this SED command is doing?
# 4  
Old 11-30-2009
It deletes the occurrence of a dash character followed by one or more "word" characters. Word characters are alphanumeric characters plus the underscore. Note the quotes they are important to protect the pattern from interpretation by the shell.
Last edited by Scrutinizer; 11-30-2009 at 03:37 PM..
 
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