How do I use sed to return only the serial number here?

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

I'd appreciate the help and explaining "which each switch/command does. Thanks in advance.

1742@3min# ./fmtopo|grep serial
hc://:product-id=SUNW,Sun-Blade-2500:server-id=c3admin:serial=130B58E3146/motherboard=0/cpu=0
2 
./fmtopo | sed -n 's#.*serial=\([^/]*\)/.*#\1#p'

firstly we use -n to replace the use of grep. this way we print only lines we give print command. since I use a / in the command I used # as my command delimiter (you can use any character). "s" is for substitution. we substitute that regex, which actually matches the entire line but has a back reference (the black-slashed parenthesizes) which is referenced as \1 in the replacement part of the substitution command. then finally the "p" will print that line, and that line only.

3

Thank you very much, neutron scott. I genuinely appreciate your knowledge and time.