UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Here's the input:

Code:

alpha, numeric or alphanumeric string ("line 1 string")
numeric string ("line 2 string")
numeric string ("line 3 string")
numeric string ("line 4 string")
...

where
- each numeric string is in a pattern that can be matched with RE but
- there can be any number of numeric string lines

Here's the desired output:

Code:

line 1 string line 2 string
line 1 string line 3 string
line 1 string line 4 string

The challenge was to do this with sed.

The best I got with sed alone was:
[CODE]
line 1 string line 2 string line 3 string line 4 string
[CODE]
And I had to use tr because my old sed doesn't detect control characters.

Then I tried the shell using this nested loop:

Code:

while read x
do
for i in `sed '2,$p'`
do
echo $x $i
done
done

It works but I get duplicates of lines 2 through the last line.

I'm not sure what you're trying to do. But maybe this helps some....

Code:

exec < input-file
read first
while read line ; do
     echo $first $line
done

Would you believe it was simply a matter of me forgetting to use the -n operand with sed?

I tried to tag this post for deletion seconds later when I realised it. But I guess that didn't work.

Thanks for responding though.