UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I have a file that I want to remove all of the periods from. I am using the below to remove quotations and it works fine -I thought I could make it work for the period but it does not. Any help would be appreciated.


works to remove the double quote mark (")
sed -e 's/"//g' input file >output file

tried
sed -e 's/.//g' input file >output file

and
sed -e 's/"."//g' input file >output file

valhutch

Code:

sed -e 's/[.]//g' input file >output file

Hey What if you donot want to redirect the file and instead just read the existing file and replace what ever you wanna do and then save it ?....
any ideasss ??

Some versions of 'sed' support in-place editing using the '-i' option, while others do not.

An alternative is using perl from the command line ( assuming it's installed ), and using the '-i -pe' options.

'-i' edits files in place.
'-e' allows you to define Perl code to be executed
'-p' loops around every line in the file and performs the substitution

This will remove all period characters from the file "input_file".

Code:

perl -i -pe 's/[.]//g' input_file

Also, in response to the original message, you can also escape the '.' character with a backslash.

Code:

sed -e 's/\.//g'

This is because in regular expression language, the period is a special character which represents "any character", so if you want it to represent a literal period, it must be escaped.

The new -i option for sed stands for edit files in place:

$ sed -i -e 's/\.//g' input_file

Note:
$ sed --version
GNU sed version 4.1.5

Your sed may not have this option