UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

hi

I have an expression


aaabbb; xxx xxxi

i need to get the ouput as

xxx xxxi

i am using sed -e 's/\(*;\)//g' but it is not working..??

can some one suggest..

This is urgent

Your sed syntax is incorrect.

Code:

sed -e 's/.*;//' file

In regular expression syntax, dot (.) means "any character (other than newline)" and asterisk (*) means "the previous regular expression zero or more times". A sole asterisk is a syntax error.

The semicolon (";") is a special character in sed, which means "end of command". For instance you can write

Code:

sed 's/a/b/
     s/c/d'

or

Code:

sed 's/a/b;s/c/d/'

which would be the same. Instead of using the next line for the next command the semicolon separates the commands the same.

Either escape it (by preceding it with a backslash: "\;") or use a character class: "[;]". A square bracket means "any of the characters inside", like "[aou]" would mean either an "a" or an "o" or a "u". Inside the square brackets all characters lose their special meaning too, so in effect it is the same as escaping them.

I hope this helps.

bakunin

Code:

 echo "aaabbb; xxx xxxi" |  sed -e 's/\(.*;\)//g'

think you missed a . as in .*

hey i tried all the solutions mentioned in the reply...
it is replacing my whole string..

i mean along with aaabbb; xxx xxxi is also getting removed!!!
so iam in a fix!

At least in my version of sed, it's not special inside a regular expression. But maybe AIX is different.

Try cut command as follows

cut -f 2 -d ';'

eg:
$echo "aaabbb; xxx xxix"|cut -f 2 -d ';'