UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Happy New Year!!!

I'm trying to cut out some text in a data file where I only want the first line and the last line.

For example.

1. Colin Was here <<-- Text I want to cut out
2. THIS IS THE TEXT I WANT TO CUT <- CUT THIS OUT
3. OUT BECAUSE IT'S NO GOOD TO ME <- CUT THIS OUT
4. I live here <<-- Text I want to cut out

Then put the output of line 1 and 4 into a new file.

Can this be done?

Thanks in advance.

Well, if you know what text you want cut out, you can do something like this:

Code:

sed -e '/THIS IS THE TEXT I WANT TO CUT/d'   \
       -e '/OUT BECAUSE IT'S NO GOOD TO ME/d' < in_file > out_file

That will delete the entire line containing that string, while

Code:

sed -e 's/THIS IS THE TEXT I WANT TO CUT//g'   \
       -e 's/OUT BECAUSE IT'S NO GOOD TO ME//g' < in_file > out_file

will only delete the words...

That's a fairly simple explanation / solution, so if you need something better, please post back with some more examples...

Hope that helps

hmm the trouble is that the text will different all the time, but I think that there will always be a common bit at the start on both lines.

1. ADDRESS1 then could be any text here
2.
3.
4. Post Code then any kind of text

Try:
sed -n '1p;$p' inputfile

And if you want the lines beginning with ADDRESS1 and Post Code, you could just pull those out with grep:

grep -e "^ADDRESS1" -e "^Post Code" input_file

if you want only the first and last line in a text file why don't you try this...

head -n 1 filename > outputfile
tail -n 1 filename >> outputfile