UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

What is your OS ?
Are you sure that your input file has several lines, you can check with wc -l file ?

Yes, the input does contain lines and txt. It has 2097152 lines to be exact, filled with a mixture of lines like these

This is the exact glimpse of what it's actually inside.

Code:

A08
AAG
ABF
ACE
ADD
AEC
AFB
AGA
A80
A89
A98
B0G

So I do wish to remove those line containing 0 8 & 9

Show us the output from the command line:

Code:

ls -l *put.txt; echo 'output:'; cat output.txt

I got this as an outcome :

Code:

ls -l *put.txt; echo 'input:'; cat input.txt; echo; echo 'output:'; cat output.txt
-rw-r--r--@ 1 Nexeu  staff  17639800 Feb 11 23:53 input.txt
input:
9DCGA8D
A88GDCF8
output:
cat: output.txt: No such file or directory

What was it suppose to do btw?

Might be due to the colon in front of the done. I could replicate that behaviour but it was gone when using a semicolon.

---------- Post updated at 10:42 ---------- Previous update was at 10:41 ----------

When applying any of the proposals to this input, the output must be empty.

This shows us that you did not run the sed command you showed us because the file output.txt does not exist. Furthermore, despite what you said was in input.txt in post #9, we now know that there are only two lines in input.txt and both of them contain decimal digits ("8" and "9" in the 1st line and "8" three times in the 2nd line). What the other 17,397,783 bytes are in that file is a mystery, but are apparently non-printable characters (quite possibly control characters such as null bytes). So, we would expect that if you had run the sed command:

Code:

sed '/[[:digit:]]/d' input.txt > output.txt

the file output.txt would exist but would be empty. But, since sed is only defined to work on text files and it doesn't appear that input.txt is a text file; all bets are off.

Sorry, yes I kind deleted the output.txt.
This is the out come after apply this sed commad to input.txt.

sed '/[[:digit:]]/d' input.txt > output.txt

The result of output.txt is still nothing inside.

Code:

Untitleds-MacBook-Pro:Documents Nexeu$ ls -l *put.txt; echo 'input:'; cat input.txt; echo; echo 'output:'; cat output.txt
-rw-r--r--@ 1 Nexeu  staff  17639800 Feb 11 23:53 input.txt
-rw-r--r--  1 Nexeu  staff         0 Feb 12 17:00 output.txt
input:
9DCGA8D
A88GDCF8
output:
Untitleds-MacBook-Pro:Documents Nexeu$

The output.txt is blank as usual and nothing is inside.

If the characters are non-printable, what are the options I have to fix this? In the input.txt, there's only A-Z and 0 8 9 characters, no any other special characters.

I'm using Mac Os X Yosemite Ver 10.10.2 (14C109) btw