I have been using the sed command in the following fashion:

sed -i 's/\(.*\MODEL1_INPUT_DIR:\).*/\1/g' /file1
sed -i 's/\(.*\MODEL2_INPUT_DIR:\).*/\1/g' /file2
sed -i 's/\(.*\MODEL3_INPUT_DIR:\).*/\1/g' /file3
sed -i 's/\(.*\dpt_DIR:\).*/\1/g' /file1
sed -i 's/\(.*\wbt_DIR:\).*/\1/g' /file2
etc..

And everything works fine, such that whenever it finds these strings within their respective files, it deletes the line after the string.

However, for this particular instance:

sed -i 's/\(.*\WF_INPUT_DIR:\).*/\1/g' /file1

It is not working. Furthermore, any instance when the first two letters are "WF", the sed command does not seem to recognize this pattern and does not delete anything after this. For example:

sed -i 's/\(.*\WF_FLAG:\).*/\1/g' /file1
sed -i 's/\(.*\WF_OUTPUT_DIR:\).*/\1/g' /file1

would not work either, such that any text after these strings are not deleted. Any thoughts?

Welcome. Can you please show some sample data for the sed statement in question?

1 members found this post helpful.

Turbocapitalist is right. A well-formed inquiry should include a sample of an input file (or files) and a sample of the desired output file.

Lacking that, I offer this guess:
You have over-used the backslash character.
\W specifies a word boundary and you probably didn't intend that.
Try changing this ...
... to this ...
Daniel B. Martin

.

As others have pointed out, an example of the input and the expected output are very helpful to others in understanding your question.

Please review the Site FAQ for guidance in asking well formed questions, and especially the links at bottom of that page.

All that said, I believe danielbmartin has pointed to the most obvious problem.

Welcome to LQ, and good luck!

One oddity: If your pattern is designed to find the first match and delete the rest of the line, then adding the g qualifier which finds all matches is meaningless. It probably doesn't hurt anything in this case - unless you wanted to preserve multiple occurrences of the pattern.