UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I was wondering how I could cut only the names of items from the following list:

spoons50
cups29
forks50
plates29

I used "man cut" and thought -c would help, but the items have different character lengths. Please note that there is no space between the item and number (so I can't use -f/-d). I'm hoping to using only the cut command. Thank you everyone for your help.

This removes ALL letters

Code:

tr -d '[:alpha:]' < infile > newfile

Let's say you have the word list in file x.x, then...

Code:

cat x.x | tr -d  '/a-z,A-Z/'

Unless your intention is to delete letters, commas, and forward slashes, your tr command is flawed. It almost looks like its argument is intended to be a regular expression.

Unrelatedly, there's no need to use cat. Shell redirection will do the job just fine.

Regards,
Alister

Plus, is "cut only letters" the real intention? Isn't it only number that are wanted?

Code:

$ cat x
 echo aBc123De | tr -d '[:alpha:]' 

$ cat <(cat x) | tr -d '[:alpha:]'
  123 |  - '[::]' 

# cat <(cat <(cat x)) | tr -d '[a-zA-Z]'
  123 |  - '::'

Code:

$ grep -o "[0-9]\+" x
123

Only tr -d '[a-z][A-Z]' and tr -d '[:alpha:]' seem correct.
Indeed tr -d '[a-zA-Z]' either deletes [ and ] or gives an error (Solaris /usr/xpg4/bin/tr).

Now that I think about it, I wasn't really clear with my question. I was hoping to cut the items into a new file. Something like cut "just letters"> newfile

It seems like the answers will all remove the letters (or in ths case, spoons, cups,etc.)and will leave just the numbers. However, I want the opposite.

---------- Post updated at 02:30 PM ---------- Previous update was at 02:25 PM ----------

Actually the full line is something like this:

Spoons50Joe
Cups29John
Forks50Jack
Plates29Sam

I want to cut the first part (spoons, cups, forks, plates) and create a new file containing a list of those items only. I don't want to remove all the letters (just the names at the end) and since there is no space, I can't use -f -d