extract the characters before () using grep

Question

I need to extract the characters before the character '('. My file structure is:

rose(good)ook

daisy()no

lilly(bad)fine

sunflower()nice

I need output file as in the form of:

rose

daisy

lilly

sunflower

can anybody tell the command for this.....

awk, grep or sed are preferable...

Answer 1

An alternative sed solution:

sed 's/(.*//' file

Answer 2

Using cut:

$ <file cut -d \( -f 1
rose

daisy

lilly

sunflower

Using sed:

$ <file sed -e 's/\(.*\)(.*$/\1/'
rose

daisy

lilly

sunflower

Answer 3

An awk solution:

$ awk -F'(' '{print $1}' file
rose

daisy

lilly

sunflower

or GNU grep:

grep -oP '.*?(?=\()' file

Answer 4

You can use cut command:

cut -f1 -d "(" file_name