deleting characters at the beginning of a line

poobeany · 09-21-2003, 10:41 PM

im not sure if this is the place for this, but oh well. here is what im trying to do. i have a list that is in this format:

(423) smokeywrz
(407) Wonderbox
(359) Dark Sian
(347) ScorpioNinja

im trying to delete everything in the parentheses (and the parentheses themselves) so im left with just the names. is there a command that i can use to delete the first few characters in every line? i tried tr and sed, but i failed. basically, im just really confused

MasterC · 09-22-2003, 12:27 AM

You can try with cut, but YMMV with your understanding. I believe this might live better in "programming", however I'll leave it up to you whether it gets moved or not (simply reply with your request).

Cool

poobeany · 09-22-2003, 07:33 PM

yeah, that would be cool if you moved it. i tried with cut, but it always says this:

cut: invalid byte, character or field list
Try `cut --help' for more information.

im not sure the syntax, even though it says in the man pages. if i wanna remove (423) and stuff like it, i would use (*) right? but im not sure how to do that, and i tried as many combinations of things i could. thanks.

MasterC · 09-22-2003, 11:24 PM

Cool:
Moving to Programming

SaTaN · 09-23-2003, 01:03 AM

cat file | awk 'BEGIN{FS=")"}{print $2}'

SaTaN · 09-23-2003, 01:36 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by poobeany
yeah, that would be cool if you moved it. i tried with cut, but it always says this:

cut: invalid byte, character or field list
Try `cut --help' for more information.

im not sure the syntax, even though it says in the man pages. if i wanna remove (423) and stuff like it, i would use (*) right? but im not sure how to do that, and i tried as many combinations of things i could. thanks.

cat file | cut -d ")" -f2

THis works fine

poobeany · 09-23-2003, 05:17 PM

thanks a ton guys