I have a String
/abc/gef \*(cse,fff) to delete from a file,have to match the full string pattern,tried with
sed -i '//abc/gef \*(cse,fff)/d' filename but this ends in an error:
sed: -e expression #1, char xx: expected newer version of sed
I also tried the following options but didn't work:
sed -i '/\/abc\/gef \*(cse,fff)/d' filename sed -i 's|/abc/gef \*(cse,fff)||g' filename What is the right command for this?
The following works with GNU sed versions 4.5 and 4.7 and will delete any lines that contain the string:
sed '/\/abc\/gef \\\*(cse,fff)/d' file You have to use \ to escape the two instances of / in the string so that they aren't taken as the delimiter and * which otherwise expands to the character before it which is f. The latter will cause it not to match the string.
You can also use the s option which allows other characters as a delimiter if you only want to delete the string itself throughout the file and not the entire line:
sed 's|/abc/gef \\\*(cse,fff)||g' file That uses | as a delimiter so that you don't have to escape /.
To edit the file in place after you're sure that it does what you want, you can use -i like you have above:
sed -i '/\/abc\/gef \\\*(cse,fff)/d' file sed -i 's|/abc/gef \\\*(cse,fff)||g' file EDIT: I have updated the answer as the string in the question is different from what it was when originally posted.
s command, getting rid of the need for escaping the slashes./.../d version deletes the entire line that contains the string, though, not just the string.The problem is that both \ (escape character) and * (0 or more) have a special meaning in regular expressions, so you need to escape them in order to use them as literal characters. Now, the way to escape something is to add a \ before it. So, in order for * to match a literal asterisk and not mean "0 or more", you would write \*. Similarly, to escape the \ you would write \\. Putting this together, we have:
$ cat file foo bar /abc/gef \*(cse,fff) baz And:
$ sed '/\/abc\/gef \\\*(cse,fff)/d' file foo bar baz Note how I have also escaped the / since // is the match operator in sed. This is why we have /\/abc\/gef and not //abc/gef. The d at the end means "delete any line matching this pattern".
This sounds like a job for grep:
$ cat file line 1 line 2 /abc/gef *(cse,fff) line 4 $ grep -Fxv '/abc/gef *(cse,fff)' file line 1 line 2 line 4 
