Here are my attempts to replace a b character with a newline using sed while running bash
$> echo 'abc' | sed 's/b/\n/'
anc
no, that's not it
$> echo 'abc' | sed 's/b/\\n/'
a\nc
no, that's not it either. The output I want is
a
c
HELP!
Looks like you are on BSD or Solaris. Try this:
[jaypal:~/Temp] echo 'abc' | sed 's/b/\
> /'
a
c
Add a black slash and hit enter and complete your sed statement.
$ echo 'abc' | sed 's/b/\'$'\n''/'
a
c
In Bash, $'\n' expands to a single quoted newline character (see "QUOTING" section of man bash). The three strings are concatenated before being passed into sed as an argument. Sed requires that the newline character be escaped, hence the first backslash in the code I pasted.
You didn't say you want to globally replace all b. If yes, you want tr instead:
$ echo abcbd | tr b $'\n'
a
c
d
Works for me on Solaris 5.8 and bash 2.03
In a multiline file I had to pipe through tr on both sides of sed, like so:
echo "$FILE_CONTENTS" | \
tr '\n' ¥ | tr ' ' ∑ | mySedFunction $1 | tr ¥ '\n' | tr ∑ ' '
See unix likes to strip out newlines and extra leading spaces and all sorts of things, because I guess that seemed like the thing to do at the time when it was made back in the 1900s. Anyway, this method I show above solves the problem 100%. Wish I would have seen someone post this somewhere because it would have saved me about three hours of my life.
echo 'abc' | sed 's/b/\'\n'/'
you are missing '' around \n
Related
Without using sed or awk, only cut, how do I get the last field when the number of fields are unknown or change with every line?
You could try something like this:
echo 'maps.google.com' | rev | cut -d'.' -f 1 | rev
Explanation
rev reverses "maps.google.com" to be moc.elgoog.spam
cut uses dot (ie '.') as the delimiter, and chooses the first field, which is moc
lastly, we reverse it again to get com
Use a parameter expansion. This is much more efficient than any kind of external command, cut (or grep) included.
data=foo,bar,baz,qux
last=${data##*,}
See BashFAQ #100 for an introduction to native string manipulation in bash.
It is not possible using just cut. Here is a way using grep:
grep -o '[^,]*$'
Replace the comma for other delimiters.
Explanation:
-o (--only-matching) only outputs the part of the input that matches the pattern (the default is to print the entire line if it contains a match).
[^,] is a character class that matches any character other than a comma.
* matches the preceding pattern zero or more time, so [^,]* matches zero or more non‑comma characters.
$ matches the end of the string.
Putting this together, the pattern matches zero or more non-comma characters at the end of the string.
When there are multiple possible matches, grep prefers the one that starts earliest. So the entire last field will be matched.
Full example:
If we have a file called data.csv containing
one,two,three
foo,bar
then grep -o '[^,]*$' < data.csv will output
three
bar
Without awk ?...
But it's so simple with awk:
echo 'maps.google.com' | awk -F. '{print $NF}'
AWK is a way more powerful tool to have in your pocket.
-F if for field separator
NF is the number of fields (also stands for the index of the last)
There are multiple ways. You may use this too.
echo "Your string here"| tr ' ' '\n' | tail -n1
> here
Obviously, the blank space input for tr command should be replaced with the delimiter you need.
This is the only solution possible for using nothing but cut:
echo "s.t.r.i.n.g." | cut -d'.' -f2-
[repeat_following_part_forever_or_until_out_of_memory:] | cut -d'.' -f2-
Using this solution, the number of fields can indeed be unknown and vary from time to time. However as line length must not exceed LINE_MAX characters or fields, including the new-line character, then an arbitrary number of fields can never be part as a real condition of this solution.
Yes, a very silly solution but the only one that meets the criterias I think.
If your input string doesn't contain forward slashes then you can use basename and a subshell:
$ basename "$(echo 'maps.google.com' | tr '.' '/')"
This doesn't use sed or awk but it also doesn't use cut either, so I'm not quite sure if it qualifies as an answer to the question as its worded.
This doesn't work well if processing input strings that can contain forward slashes. A workaround for that situation would be to replace forward slash with some other character that you know isn't part of a valid input string. For example, the pipe (|) character is also not allowed in filenames, so this would work:
$ basename "$(echo 'maps.google.com/some/url/things' | tr '/' '|' | tr '.' '/')" | tr '|' '/'
the following implements A friend's suggestion
#!/bin/bash
rcut(){
nu="$( echo $1 | cut -d"$DELIM" -f 2- )"
if [ "$nu" != "$1" ]
then
rcut "$nu"
else
echo "$nu"
fi
}
$ export DELIM=.
$ rcut a.b.c.d
d
An alternative using perl would be:
perl -pe 's/(.*) (.*)$/$2/' file
where you may change \t for whichever the delimiter of file is
It is better to use awk while working with tabular data. You don't have to master on command. If it can be achieved by awk, why not use that? I suggest you do not waste your precious time, and use a handful of commands to get the job done.
Example:
# $NF refers to the last column in awk
ll | awk '{print $NF}'
If you have a file named filelist.txt that is a list paths such as the following:
c:/dir1/dir2/file1.h
c:/dir1/dir2/dir3/file2.h
then you can do this:
rev filelist.txt | cut -d"/" -f1 | rev
Adding an approach to this old question just for the fun of it:
$ cat input.file # file containing input that needs to be processed
a;b;c;d;e
1;2;3;4;5
no delimiter here
124;adsf;15454
foo;bar;is;null;info
$ cat tmp.sh # showing off the script to do the job
#!/bin/bash
delim=';'
while read -r line; do
while [[ "$line" =~ "$delim" ]]; do
line=$(cut -d"$delim" -f 2- <<<"$line")
done
echo "$line"
done < input.file
$ ./tmp.sh # output of above script/processed input file
e
5
no delimiter here
15454
info
Besides bash, only cut is used.
Well, and echo, I guess.
choose -1
choose supports negative indexing (the syntax is similar to Python's slices).
I realized if we just ensure a trailing delimiter exists, it works. So in my case I have comma and whitespace delimiters. I add a space at the end;
$ ans="a, b"
$ ans+=" "; echo ${ans} | tr ',' ' ' | tr -s ' ' | cut -d' ' -f2
b
Without using sed or awk, only cut, how do I get the last field when the number of fields are unknown or change with every line?
You could try something like this:
echo 'maps.google.com' | rev | cut -d'.' -f 1 | rev
Explanation
rev reverses "maps.google.com" to be moc.elgoog.spam
cut uses dot (ie '.') as the delimiter, and chooses the first field, which is moc
lastly, we reverse it again to get com
Use a parameter expansion. This is much more efficient than any kind of external command, cut (or grep) included.
data=foo,bar,baz,qux
last=${data##*,}
See BashFAQ #100 for an introduction to native string manipulation in bash.
It is not possible using just cut. Here is a way using grep:
grep -o '[^,]*$'
Replace the comma for other delimiters.
Explanation:
-o (--only-matching) only outputs the part of the input that matches the pattern (the default is to print the entire line if it contains a match).
[^,] is a character class that matches any character other than a comma.
* matches the preceding pattern zero or more time, so [^,]* matches zero or more non‑comma characters.
$ matches the end of the string.
Putting this together, the pattern matches zero or more non-comma characters at the end of the string.
When there are multiple possible matches, grep prefers the one that starts earliest. So the entire last field will be matched.
Full example:
If we have a file called data.csv containing
one,two,three
foo,bar
then grep -o '[^,]*$' < data.csv will output
three
bar
Without awk ?...
But it's so simple with awk:
echo 'maps.google.com' | awk -F. '{print $NF}'
AWK is a way more powerful tool to have in your pocket.
-F if for field separator
NF is the number of fields (also stands for the index of the last)
There are multiple ways. You may use this too.
echo "Your string here"| tr ' ' '\n' | tail -n1
> here
Obviously, the blank space input for tr command should be replaced with the delimiter you need.
This is the only solution possible for using nothing but cut:
echo "s.t.r.i.n.g." | cut -d'.' -f2-
[repeat_following_part_forever_or_until_out_of_memory:] | cut -d'.' -f2-
Using this solution, the number of fields can indeed be unknown and vary from time to time. However as line length must not exceed LINE_MAX characters or fields, including the new-line character, then an arbitrary number of fields can never be part as a real condition of this solution.
Yes, a very silly solution but the only one that meets the criterias I think.
If your input string doesn't contain forward slashes then you can use basename and a subshell:
$ basename "$(echo 'maps.google.com' | tr '.' '/')"
This doesn't use sed or awk but it also doesn't use cut either, so I'm not quite sure if it qualifies as an answer to the question as its worded.
This doesn't work well if processing input strings that can contain forward slashes. A workaround for that situation would be to replace forward slash with some other character that you know isn't part of a valid input string. For example, the pipe (|) character is also not allowed in filenames, so this would work:
$ basename "$(echo 'maps.google.com/some/url/things' | tr '/' '|' | tr '.' '/')" | tr '|' '/'
the following implements A friend's suggestion
#!/bin/bash
rcut(){
nu="$( echo $1 | cut -d"$DELIM" -f 2- )"
if [ "$nu" != "$1" ]
then
rcut "$nu"
else
echo "$nu"
fi
}
$ export DELIM=.
$ rcut a.b.c.d
d
An alternative using perl would be:
perl -pe 's/(.*) (.*)$/$2/' file
where you may change \t for whichever the delimiter of file is
It is better to use awk while working with tabular data. You don't have to master on command. If it can be achieved by awk, why not use that? I suggest you do not waste your precious time, and use a handful of commands to get the job done.
Example:
# $NF refers to the last column in awk
ll | awk '{print $NF}'
If you have a file named filelist.txt that is a list paths such as the following:
c:/dir1/dir2/file1.h
c:/dir1/dir2/dir3/file2.h
then you can do this:
rev filelist.txt | cut -d"/" -f1 | rev
Adding an approach to this old question just for the fun of it:
$ cat input.file # file containing input that needs to be processed
a;b;c;d;e
1;2;3;4;5
no delimiter here
124;adsf;15454
foo;bar;is;null;info
$ cat tmp.sh # showing off the script to do the job
#!/bin/bash
delim=';'
while read -r line; do
while [[ "$line" =~ "$delim" ]]; do
line=$(cut -d"$delim" -f 2- <<<"$line")
done
echo "$line"
done < input.file
$ ./tmp.sh # output of above script/processed input file
e
5
no delimiter here
15454
info
Besides bash, only cut is used.
Well, and echo, I guess.
choose -1
choose supports negative indexing (the syntax is similar to Python's slices).
I realized if we just ensure a trailing delimiter exists, it works. So in my case I have comma and whitespace delimiters. I add a space at the end;
$ ans="a, b"
$ ans+=" "; echo ${ans} | tr ',' ' ' | tr -s ' ' | cut -d' ' -f2
b
I am trying to delete empty lines using sed:
sed '/^$/d'
but I have no luck with it.
For example, I have these lines:
xxxxxx
yyyyyy
zzzzzz
and I want it to be like:
xxxxxx
yyyyyy
zzzzzz
What should be the code for this?
You may have spaces or tabs in your "empty" line. Use POSIX classes with sed to remove all lines containing only whitespace:
sed '/^[[:space:]]*$/d'
A shorter version that uses ERE, for example with gnu sed:
sed -r '/^\s*$/d'
(Note that sed does NOT support PCRE.)
I am missing the awk solution:
awk 'NF' file
Which would return:
xxxxxx
yyyyyy
zzzzzz
How does this work? Since NF stands for "number of fields", those lines being empty have 0 fields, so that awk evaluates 0 to False and no line is printed; however, if there is at least one field, the evaluation is True and makes awk perform its default action: print the current line.
sed
'/^[[:space:]]*$/d'
'/^\s*$/d'
'/^$/d'
-n '/^\s*$/!p'
grep
.
-v '^$'
-v '^\s*$'
-v '^[[:space:]]*$'
awk
/./
'NF'
'length'
'/^[ \t]*$/ {next;} {print}'
'!/^[ \t]*$/'
sed '/^$/d' should be fine, are you expecting to modify the file in place? If so you should use the -i flag.
Maybe those lines are not empty, so if that's the case, look at this question Remove empty lines from txtfiles, remove spaces from start and end of line I believe that's what you're trying to achieve.
I believe this is the easiest and fastest one:
cat file.txt | grep .
If you need to ignore all white-space lines as well then try this:
cat file.txt | grep '\S'
Example:
s="\
\
a\
b\
\
Below is TAB:\
\
Below is space:\
\
c\
\
"; echo "$s" | grep . | wc -l; echo "$s" | grep '\S' | wc -l
outputs
7
5
Another option without sed, awk, perl, etc
strings $file > $output
strings - print the strings of printable characters in files.
With help from the accepted answer here and the accepted answer above, I have used:
$ sed 's/^ *//; s/ *$//; /^$/d; /^\s*$/d' file.txt > output.txt
`s/^ *//` => left trim
`s/ *$//` => right trim
`/^$/d` => remove empty line
`/^\s*$/d` => delete lines which may contain white space
This covers all the bases and works perfectly for my needs. Kudos to the original posters #Kent and #kev
The command you are trying is correct, just use -E flag with it.
sed -E '/^$/d'
-E flag makes sed catch extended regular expressions. More info here
You can say:
sed -n '/ / p' filename #there is a space between '//'
You are most likely seeing the unexpected behavior because your text file was created on Windows, so the end of line sequence is \r\n. You can use dos2unix to convert it to a UNIX style text file before running sed or use
sed -r "/^\r?$/d"
to remove blank lines whether or not the carriage return is there.
This works in awk as well.
awk '!/^$/' file
xxxxxx
yyyyyy
zzzzzz
You can do something like that using "grep", too:
egrep -v "^$" file.txt
My bash-specific answer is to recommend using perl substitution operator with the global pattern g flag for this, as follows:
$ perl -pe s'/^\n|^[\ ]*\n//g' $file
xxxxxx
yyyyyy
zzzzzz
This answer illustrates accounting for whether or not the empty lines have spaces in them ([\ ]*), as well as using | to separate multiple search terms/fields. Tested on macOS High Sierra and CentOS 6/7.
FYI, the OP's original code sed '/^$/d' $file works just fine in bash Terminal on macOS High Sierra and CentOS 6/7 Linux at a high-performance supercomputing cluster.
If you want to use modern Rust tools, you can consider:
ripgrep:
cat datafile | rg '.' line with spaces is considered non empty
cat datafile | rg '\S' line with spaces is considered empty
rg '\S' datafile line with spaces is considered empty (-N can be added to remove line numbers for on screen display)
sd
cat datafile | sd '^\n' '' line with spaces is considered non empty
cat datafile | sd '^\s*\n' '' line with spaces is considered empty
sd '^\s*\n' '' datafile inplace edit
Using vim editor to remove empty lines
:%s/^$\n//g
For me with FreeBSD 10.1 with sed worked only this solution:
sed -e '/^[ ]*$/d' "testfile"
inside [] there are space and tab symbols.
test file contains:
fffffff next 1 tabline ffffffffffff
ffffffff next 1 Space line ffffffffffff
ffffffff empty 1 lines ffffffffffff
============ EOF =============
NF is the command of awk you can use to delete empty lines in a file
awk NF filename
and by using sed
sed -r "/^\r?$/d"
Below is my input
54.243.94.244, 54.243.113.63
and I want the out like below,
54.243.94.244
54.243.113.63
i.e. after comma I need to add newline.
How to achieve it in Unix? Please suggest some commands.
Another option is tr
tr ',' '\n'
sed will do the trick:
$ echo '54.243.94.244, 54.243.113.63' | sed 's/, /\n/g'
54.243.94.244
54.243.113.63
The sed command s/, /\n/g will replace all occurrences of a comma followed by a space in the input with a newline.
A simple example would be
VAR1=a
VAR1="$VAR1"$'\n'b
echo "$VAR"
This would give output like
a
b
I want to remove all the white spaces from a given text file.
Is there any shell command available for this ?
Or, how to use sed for this purpose?
I want something like below:
$ cat hello.txt | sed ....
I tried this : cat hello.txt | sed 's/ //g' .
But it removes only spaces, not tabs.
Thanks.
$ man tr
NAME
tr - translate or delete characters
SYNOPSIS
tr [OPTION]... SET1 [SET2]
DESCRIPTION
Translate, squeeze, and/or delete characters from standard
input, writing to standard output.
In order to wipe all whitespace including newlines you can try:
cat file.txt | tr -d " \t\n\r"
You can also use the character classes defined by tr (credits to htompkins comment):
cat file.txt | tr -d "[:space:]"
For example, in order to wipe just horizontal white space:
cat file.txt | tr -d "[:blank:]"
Much simpler to my opinion:
sed -r 's/\s+//g' filename
I think you may use sed to wipe out the space while not losing some infomation like changing to another line.
cat hello.txt | sed '/^$/d;s/[[:blank:]]//g'
To apply into existing file, use following:
sed -i '/^$/d;s/[[:blank:]]//g' hello.txt
Try this:
sed -e 's/[\t ]//g;/^$/d'
(found here)
The first part removes all tabs (\t) and spaces, and the second part removes all empty lines
If you want to remove ALL whitespace, even newlines:
perl -pe 's/\s+//g' file
This answer is similar to other however as some people have been complaining that the output goes to STDOUT i am just going to suggest redirecting it to the original file and overwriting it. I would never normally suggest this but sometimes quick and dirty works.
cat file.txt | tr -d " \t\n\r" > file.txt
Easiest way for me:
echo "Hello my name is Donald" | sed s/\ //g
This is probably the simplest way of doing it:
sed -r 's/\s+//g' filename > output
mv ouput filename
Dude, Just python test.py in your terminal.
f = open('/home/hduser/Desktop/data.csv' , 'r')
x = f.read().split()
f.close()
y = ' '.join(x)
f = open('/home/hduser/Desktop/data.csv','w')
f.write(y)
f.close()
Try this:
tr -d " \t" <filename
See the manpage for tr(1) for more details.
hmm...seems like something on the order of sed -e "s/[ \t\n\r\v]//g" < hello.txt should be in the right ballpark (seems to work under cygwin in any case).