Re: OT: Using sed - guru help wanted.

[Brian Dessent <brian at dessent dot net>]

Hannu E K Nevalainen wrote:

> $ echo ' a b / c d e ' | \
>   sed -e 's/ *\(.*\) *\/ *\(.*\) */.\1.\2./'
> .a b .c d e .
> 
> I want the output to be '.a b.c d e.' - that is; strip out the trailing
> spaces.
> 
> HOW do I achieve that?  ( \s = any ws, \S = any non ws )
> 
> Obviously \(.*\) grabs/includes the last space. My brain has stoppped
> working, so right now I can't work around that :-I

Personally, I can't stand the "basic" style regexps that sed uses, and I
prefer perl-compatible.  You can use the non-greedy modifier, for
example:

command | perl -pe 's!^ +(.*) +/ +(.*?) +$!.\1.\2.!'

Brian

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