UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hello era / unix gurus,

I tried the following:
sed -e "x;/^AAA/b" -e "/^BBB/b" -e d number.dat

It works. But I need to divert it to different files .How do I do it. Kindly assist if possible

Thanks and Regards,
Vinay

Did you try the script I posted above? If so, what's wrong with it? It writes lines matching "^AAA" to AAA.dat and lines matching the regular expression "^BBB" to BBB.dat, is that not what you want?

Hello era,

The script u had sent did not work.
Its giving an error
sed: command garbled: /^AAA/wAAA.dat/^BBB/wBBB.dat

That is why I tried
sed -e "x;/^AAA/b" -e "/^BBB/b" -e d number.dat
I am getting answer properly, but I dont know how to route it to different files.

The script should be on two different lines. You could also try

Code:

sed -e '/^AAA/wAAA.dat' -e '/^BBB/wBBB.dat' number.dat

The sed w command takes a file name to write the line to.

Hi era,
sed -e '/^AAA/w AAA.dat' -e '/^BBB/w BBB.dat' number.dat works..
Thanks a lot.
Can I specify the path where it should be stored:
sed -e '/^AAA/w /export/home/vinay/AAA1.dat' -e '/^BBB/w /export/home/vinay/BBB1.dat' a.dat
I hope there is some error

Also does sed provides a way to search specific fields, like the -f1 (1st field) option

Also does the sed -e '/^AAA/w AAA.dat' -e '/^BBB/w BBB.dat' number.dat traverses through the number.dat once or twice.

.. Kindly assist me if possible
Thanks and Regards,
Vinay

sed uses regular expressions only, you can create a regex to look at the first field only with regex constructs; the ^ is already halfway there, as it forces the match to happen at beginning of line. Suppose the field separator is a vertical bar; then you can just add that after the string you want to search for, to anchor it properly.

Code:

sed -e '/^AAA|/w/export/home/vinay/AAA1.dat' -e '/^BBB|/w/export/home/vinay/BBB1.dat' a.dat

This finds "AAA" followed by vertical bar, but only if it is at beginning of line (because of the ^) and ditto for "BBB".

The vertical bar has special meaning to some regular expression engines, just like the ^ -- if you get erratic behavior (all lines matching all the time) then you need to backslash-quote it, like \|. It is unfortunate that there are different dialects of sed so that we can't know for sure whether or not this is an issue in your case.

Hello era / unix gurus,

I tried the above script but its giving me
sed: command garbled: /^AAA \|/w/export/home/cmohanku/vinay/AAA1.dat

"Also does the sed -e '/^AAA/w AAA.dat' -e '/^BBB/w BBB.dat' number.dat traverses through the number.dat once or twice."


Please help me if possible

Thanks and Regards,
Vinay