tr to remove " from a file

ryedunn · 10-26-2006, 12:10 PM

Im trying to use tr to remove all " from a file and output to a new file. Ive tried the literal, wrapping in single ' etc.. its not as easy as I thought it would be.

sed 's/"//g' document1.txt > document2.txt outputs to the screen correctly but tells me it cant find document2.

ok I found that
perl -i.bak -pe 's/"//g' document1.txt
works but that really doesnt teach me why it didnt work before.

Wells · 10-26-2006, 12:29 PM

You need to escape the double quotes, so for your sed statement you would have had to do this:

sed 's/\"//g' document1.txt > document2.txt

instead of

sed 's/"//g' document1.txt > document2.txt

spirit receiver · 10-26-2006, 01:51 PM

Code:

ada@barnabas:~/tmp> cat document1.txt
john 10
"mary 20"
rick -
jack 30
ada@barnabas:~/tmp> sed 's/"//g' document1.txt > document2.txt
ada@barnabas:~/tmp> cat document2.txt
john 10
mary 20
rick -
jack 30

This works fine here. Is it possible that you forgot the ">" ?