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I want to delete the 5th word of each line in a file.
The current content of the file:
File is not updated or and will be removed
System will shut down f within 10 seconds
Please save your work 55 or copy to other location
Kindly cooperate with us D
Expected output:
File is not updated and will be removed
System will shut down within 10 seconds
Please save your work or copy to other location
Kindly cooperate with us
How about cut :
$ cut -d' ' -f1-4,6- file.txt
File is not updated and will be removed
System will shut down within 10 seconds
Please save your work or copy to other location
Kindly cooperate with us
-d' ' sets the delimiter as space
-f1-4,6- selects the first to 4th field (word), leaving the 5th one and then continue printing from 6th to the rest.
A solution with cut:
cut -d ' ' -f1-4 -f6- FILE
--complement flag to simplify things: cut --complement -d ' ' -f5. Remember to redirect the output to a new file, then mv it over the original.
Jul 15, 2015 at 10:30
awk: remove the 5th field
awk '{for (i=5; i<NF; i++) $i = $(i+1); NF--};1' file
If you want to save the file in-place: https://stackoverflow.com/q/16529716/7552
You could just erase the contents of the 5th field, but that leaves 2 consecutive output field separators:
awk '{$5 = ""};1' file
With POSIX sed:
sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]_][[:alnum:]_][[:alnum:]_]*//4' <file
_ and not anything else then :blank: or :space: ?
Jul 16, 2015 at 9:03
glenn offered a solution that is equivalent to
awk '{$5=""; print}' file
As he and others have pointed out, this
A hack to fix the third problem is
awk '{$5=""; print}' file | sed 's/ / /'
This will still leave one or more added space(s) at the end of any line that had five or fewer words going in. If you can identify a word that will never appear in the input,
awk '{$5="unicorn"; print}' file | sed 's/ *unicorn//'
will handle even that (but it still leaves problems 1 and 2).
sed 's/^\(\([[:blank:]]*[^[:blank:]]\{1,\}\)\{4\}\)[[:blank:]]*[^[:blank:]]*/\1/' YourFile > Output.txt
A more robust (sed take the longest pattern possible and pattern with * could miss separation or word in first version) but a bit longer version
sed 's/^\([[:blank:]]*\([^[:blank:]]\{1,\}[[:blank:]]\{1,\}\)\{4\}\[^[:blank:]]\{1,\}/\1/' YourFile > Output.txt
sed 's/[[:blank:]*[^[:blank:]]*//5' is better. Very good point. I suspected that sed take each single char as a entity but it take greatest unbreaked pattern as entity
Jul 16, 2015 at 11:08
sed 's/[[:blank:]][^[:blank:]]*//4' will remove the 5th field entirely.
sed 's/[[:blank:]][^[:blank:]][^[:blank:]]*//4', or, w/ GNU/BSD/toybox seds: sed -E 's/[[:blank:]][^[:blank:]]+//4'.
Perl.
perl -ne 'print $_ =~ /^(\w+ +\w+ +\w+ +\w+ +)\w+ (.*)/,"\n"' file
Another possibility, assuming GNU cut:
cut -d' ' -f5 --complement file.txt
Using Perl > 5.10 (and successfully outputting all lines :0) ):-
perl -nE '/^((\w+ +){4})\w+ *(.*)/; say $1.$3' file
