Split a text file into multiple files according column content

Question

I have a file that looks like this:

1 : Aa|xxx Aa|xxx Bb|xxx Cc|xxx Cc|xxx Cc|xxx 
2 : Cc|xxx Aa|xxx Aa|xxx Aa|xxx Bb|xxx    
3 : Bb|xxx Bb|xxx Aa|xxx Cc|xxx    
4 : Bb|xxx Aa|xxx Cc|xxx    
5 : Aa|xxx Cc|xxx Bb|xxx 

The xxx stands for an individual code Aa for example for a Name. Each line always has all three Names.

I would like to have three files containing the line number (first column) and only one name. Something like this:

1 : Aa|xxx Aa|xxx
2 : Aa|xxx Aa|xxx Aa|xxx
3 : Aa|xxx
4 : Aa|xxx
5 : Aa|xxx

Could somebody help me with this? I would be super happy. Thank you in advance!

Answer 1

A possible approach is to remove the extra content:

perl -pe 's/ (Bb|Cc)\S*//g' file > A
perl -pe 's/ (Aa|Cc)\S*//g' file > B
perl -pe 's/ (Aa|Bb)\S*//g' file > C

(the some can be done with sed, awk, ex)

Answer 2

As pointed out by @JJao, it's also very easy with sed and extended regex (-r):

$ sed -r 's/\s(Cc|Bb)\|...//g' file > A
$ sed -r 's/\s(Aa|Cc)\|...//g' file > B
$ sed -r 's/\s(Aa|Bb)\|...//g' file > C

For Os X (on Apple systems), the option -r does not mean the same as for GNU sed. In particular it does not interpret \s correctly as a space. Instead, use: [[:space:]].

If the name "xxx" following the pipe is not always 3 alphanumeric characters, replace ... in the regex by [^[:space:]]+. The cutoff for the matched name will be the first encountered space.

So the more general answer relying on sed would be for output file A:

$  sed -r 's/[[:space:]](Cc|Bb)\|[^[:space:]]+//g' file > A