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I have a file that contains the following lines:

SUKsoft:
SUKsoft: App-Conduct_Risk_Comment
SUKsoft: App-Conduct_Risk_R
SUKsoft: App-Conduct_Risk_RW

How can I remove the line "SUKsoft:"?

This line could be in any place of the file (beginning as it is now, or in the middle).

Is there a command to do this?

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4 Answers 4

Reset to default
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To remove the line use

sed -i '/SUKsoft:\s*$/d' your_file

Example

% cat foo
SUKsoft: 
SUKsoft: App-Conduct_Risk_Comment   
SUKsoft: App-Conduct_Risk_R
SUKsoft: App-Conduct_Risk_RW

% sed -i '/SUKsoft:\s*$/d' foo

% cat foo                    
SUKsoft: App-Conduct_Risk_Comment   
SUKsoft: App-Conduct_Risk_R
SUKsoft: App-Conduct_Risk_RW
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  • You are actually doing it the other way around as matching all lines having SUKsoft:[space][any stuff after that] @souravc answer is much closer to the op question
    – Kwaadpepper
    Oct 29, 2015 at 13:22
  • Any stuff after that? What do you mean? \s*$ means, many whitespaces as possible and a line end. There is no any stuff
    – A.B.
    Oct 29, 2015 at 13:26
  • Oh never mind, misread that
    – Kwaadpepper
    Oct 29, 2015 at 13:30
  • 2
    Note that \s would need -E on most other platforms and may even be unsupported altogether. Since this is Ubuntu specific site it's fine. [[:space:]] for Posix.
    – user301031
    Oct 29, 2015 at 18:20
  • @Melvyn thank you for the note. I will add this.
    – A.B.
    Oct 30, 2015 at 6:18
4

Here are the steps to remove the desired line:

$ sed 's/SUKsoft: *$//' file.txt

SUKsoft: App-Conduct_Risk_Comment
SUKsoft: App-Conduct_Risk_R
SUKsoft: App-Conduct_Risk_RW

I am assuming file.txt contains the lines.

Or,

$ sed 's/SUKsoft: *$//; /^$/d' file.txt
SUKsoft: App-Conduct_Risk_Comment
SUKsoft: App-Conduct_Risk_R
SUKsoft: App-Conduct_Risk_RW

it does not leave any blank line.

To edit in the file you can use,

sed -i 's/SUKsoft: *$//' file.txt

or

sed -i 's/SUKsoft: *$//; /^$/d' file.txt

as per your need.

See A.B's answer where it is done in more compact manner. Thanks to Wildcard.

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  • 2
    Note that there is a space after the : in the OP's text. The space would need to be included in the regex for this to work. I would recommend inserting ` *` (space asterisk) after the colon and before the $ in the regex, so that any number of spaces (including 0) would be matched. Also, just to be sure you don't match unexpected lines, it might be good to prepend a ^.
    – Wildcard
    Oct 29, 2015 at 13:08
  • Also, I only realized it when I read A.B.'s answer, but (1) the g flag isn't doing anything here (since there can only be a match at the end of the line anyways) and (2) this will leave blank lines in the file as opposed to removing the lines completely.
    – Wildcard
    Oct 29, 2015 at 13:15
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grep searches for lines that satisfy a pattern. grep -v discards lines that satisfy a pattern.

grep -v '^SUKsoft: *$'

The pattern is: lines that start (^) with SUKsoft:, possibly followed by spaces but nothing else until the end of the line ($).

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Judging from your post't raw source there's no space or sequence of spaces after "SUKsoft:", however just to be on the safe side this command will take care of those if present.

Using Perl:

perl -ne '!/^SUKsoft: *$/&&print' input
  • !/^SUKsoft:$/&&print: if the current line doesn't match the pattern ^SUKsoft: *$, which matches a line starting with SUKsoft: string followed by zero or more spaces, prints the line;
% cat input
SUKsoft:
SUKsoft: App-Conduct_Risk_Comment
SUKsoft: App-Conduct_Risk_R
SUKsoft: App-Conduct_Risk_RW
% perl -ne 'print unless /^SUKsoft: *$/' input
SUKsoft: App-Conduct_Risk_Comment
SUKsoft: App-Conduct_Risk_R
SUKsoft: App-Conduct_Risk_RW
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