it will be a lengthy explanation but ill do my best!

the syntax is separated by pipes '|'...that should help you break it down a bit so with that in mind lets take a look

the first part says im going to search a text file for a string, in this case File: and replace it with nothing, in other words, delete it.
if the '\' between 'File' and ':' are confusing this is where a tutorial on sed/regular expressions will come in handy. the '\' is seen as an escape character to search for a metacharacter as a literal (literals are alphanumeric) because in regular expressions metacharacters have special meanings, in this case is the ':'
so if we were to just run the first part we would get the following:
so we take this current output and run a second sed statement against it, this is where the pipe '|' comes in, its basically taking the output from the first statement and giving it to the second statement to be manipulated further.
so with that in mind we end up taking:
notice how we dont need to specify the input file again...

so now that we have the content that we want we need to arrange it...this is where it could seem confusing at first but the 'man' pages for sed are very informative and actually describe the option i used.
actually says to read a line 'N' then search for a new line '\n' and replace with a space. the space is necessary because without it the output would look like - it will do this for all lines until its done...there are ways to specify how far down the text you want to read but thats not relevant at this time because we want to manipulate the entire content.
so the end result looks like:
the last part is basically saying whatever the final result is to go ahead and write it to a file

to get a better idea of how the "N" works (read or append each line) add an additional N separated by a ';' - you would get the first 3 lines on 1


i hope this helps

how would one delete text using sed?

did you not even bother reading what i explained?

This command does it:

It takes a string and substitutes all the occurrences of 'Resolution: ' by and empty string.
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For joker20:

'\' before ':' is not required, cause ':' is not a metacharacter in regular expressions.

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For example, in the file input.txt I have the following text:

And run this command in shell:

I get the following output:

true - any non-alphanumeric character that i need to search for ill always throw a \ behind it just to be safe...for me its a best practice so you dont get unexpected results
thats just me though

Here's my SED one-liner:
brock;
Now that we have done the work for you, I hope you will look at the reference material we cited---study it until you understand what these commands are doing.

interesting approach, i like it

heres one for just for kicks lol (im just trying to see how short i can get it)

im done everyobody, i used awk to only save the part after the colon and then echo to show both variables.

brock you have learned a valuable lesson that there is always more than one way to solve a problem in Linux. However, I think what you really need here is some general knowledge about Linux and not specifically on sed. I used Linux for a few years before I typed my first sed command.


Bookmark these pages and get familiar with them:
http://tldp.org
http://tldp.org/LDP/Bash-Beginners-G...tml/index.html
http://ss64.com/bash

An Awesome linux/bash book: www.linuxcommand.org

Here's a couple cheet sheets you may want to reference(DON'T HANDICAP YOURSELF AND BECOME A COPY/PASTER! Learn what these do as you use them or need them):

http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2010/11/50-linux-commands/
http://g33kinfo.com/info/wp-content/.../04/comfu1.txt

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