How delete characters of specific line with sed?

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi,

I have a text file with some lines like this:

/MEDIA/DISK1/23568742.MOV
/MEDIA/DISK1/87456321.AVI
/MEDIA/DISK2/PART1/45753131.AVI
/IMPORT/44452.WAV
...

I want to remove the last 12 characters in each line that it ends "AVI". Should look like this:

/MEDIA/DISK1/23568742.MOV
/MEDIA/DISK1/
/MEDIA/DISK2/PART1/
/IMPORT/44452.WAV
...

Does anyone know how to do it with sed?

Thank you,

I�aki

2

Try:

sed 's/.\{9\}AVI$//' file
3

Try this sed command:

sed 's/[0-9]\{1,\}.AVI$//' filename
4

Sorry for not having answered before. Neither solution has worked. In fact, the file does not change anything.

Does anyone would think otherwise?

Thank you,

5

if you want to change in the file itself, then you need to use -i

before that make a copy of the file and apply sed with -i

sed -i 's/.\{9\}AVI$//' file
6

The solution given by Scrutinizer and spacebar indeed works! if you wanted the result in a file, just redirect the output to another file.

sed 's/.\{9\}AVI$//' file > output_file

sed 's/[0-9]\{1,\}.AVI$//' filename > output_file
7

I am sorry, but I don not known I am doing wrong:

[root@luke /tmp]$ cat test.txt
/MEDIA/DISK1/23568742.MOV
/MEDIA/DISK1/87456321.AVI
/MEDIA/DISK2/PART1/45753131.AVI
/IMPORT/44452.WAV
[root@luke /tmp]$ sed 's/.\{9\}AVI$//' test.txt
/MEDIA/DISK1/23568742.MOV
/MEDIA/DISK1/87456321.AVI
/MEDIA/DISK2/PART1/45753131.AVI
/IMPORT/44452.WAV
[root@luke /tmp]$ cat test.txt
/MEDIA/DISK1/23568742.MOV
/MEDIA/DISK1/87456321.AVI
/MEDIA/DISK2/PART1/45753131.AVI
/IMPORT/44452.WAV
[root@luke /tmp]$ sed 's/[0-9]\{1,\}.AVI$//' test.txt
/MEDIA/DISK1/23568742.MOV
/MEDIA/DISK1/87456321.AVI
/MEDIA/DISK2/PART1/45753131.AVI
/IMPORT/44452.WAV
[root@luke /tmp]$ cat test.txt
/MEDIA/DISK1/23568742.MOV
/MEDIA/DISK1/87456321.AVI
/MEDIA/DISK2/PART1/45753131.AVI
/IMPORT/44452.WAV
[root@luke /tmp]$ sed -i 's/.\{9\}AVI$//' test.txt
[root@luke /tmp]$ cat test.txt
/MEDIA/DISK1/23568742.MOV
/MEDIA/DISK1/87456321.AVI
/MEDIA/DISK2/PART1/45753131.AVI
/IMPORT/44452.WAV
[root@luke /tmp]$ sed 's/.\{9\}AVI$//' test.txt > test_out.txt
[root@luke /tmp]$ cat test_out.txt
/MEDIA/DISK1/23568742.MOV
/MEDIA/DISK1/87456321.AVI
/MEDIA/DISK2/PART1/45753131.AVI
/IMPORT/44452.WAV
[root@luke /tmp]$ sed 's/[0-9]\{1,\}.AVI$//' test.txt > test_out.txt
[root@luke /tmp]$ cat test_out.txt
/MEDIA/DISK1/23568742.MOV
/MEDIA/DISK1/87456321.AVI
/MEDIA/DISK2/PART1/45753131.AVI
/IMPORT/44452.WAV
[root@luke /tmp]$

Why did not it work?

Thank you.

8

can you try this..

sed 's/.........AVI//' test.txt

if this is also not working, can you post the output of the below command

od -c test.txt
1 Like
9

try:

dos2unix infile | sed 's/.\{9\}AVI$//'
10

Hi Itkamaraj,

This way does work. Thank you very much!!!

---------- Post updated at 06:06 PM ---------- Previous update was at 06:01 PM ----------

Hi Rdrtx1,

converting file to Unix format not working.

Thank you.

11

In my command, can you add $ to make sure, you are changing the lines with end with AVI

sed 's/.........AVI$//' test.txt

what is your OS ? and what vesrion of SED you are using ?

12

With $ also works.
My OS is RHELinux WS release 4 (Nahant Update 3) and version of sed is 4.1.2.

13

I don't think dos2unix and unix2dos are filters; they make changes to the file given by overwriting it. So, piping the output to sed does not make sense here.