Removing asterisks from a file

[Karl Larsen]

James Gray wrote:
>
> On 16/10/2008, at 4:13 PM, Ranmadhu Wijayatilaka wrote:
>
>> James Gray wrote:
>>> sed "s#*##g" file.txt > new_file.txt
>>>
>>> That will remove the asterisks from "file.txt" and dump the result
>>> into "new_file.txt"
>> Fantastic! Thank you. That does what I need. For my benefit, how does
>> that command work?
>
> The basic syntax for sed is:
>
> sed [expression] [file]
>
> So [expression] is applied against [file] and the result dumped to 
> standard out.  So by redirecting STDOUT using ">" it writes the result 
> to the file "new_file.txt" instead of the screen.
>
> Now the real magic in [expression] that I used is in putting the whole 
> thing in double quotes to avoid the shell (bash etc) trying to expand 
> the "*" and also avoids the need to escape characters.  However the 
> "s" command I gave sed means substitute:
>
> s/substitution pattern/replacement/  (although I used "#" instead of 
> "/").  So in this case sed will replace the FIRST instance 
> "substitution pattern" with "replacement" on each line it occurs.  If 
> there is more than one occurrence on any line, you need to suffix the 
> substitution command with "g" to make it globally replace ALL 
> occurrences on each line.
>
> There are plenty of really good sed tutorials online just google "sed 
> primer".
>
> Regards,
>
> James
    And if you do not like all that //\./\ which is confusing in the 
most basic case, from Applications bring up your file in gedit (Text 
Editor). Observe all the * and in gedit and then click on Search and 
then Replace or (Ctrl-H) then tell it to Replace with a space and click 
on replace all.  This is harder to type than it is to do :-)

Karl\/



-- 

	Karl F. Larsen, AKA K5DI
	Linux User
	#450462   http://counter.li.org.
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