Manipulating a text file with grep

Question

Ok, so I have a text file formatted like this, it has several rows going down.

EXAMPLE1:EXAMPLE2:EXAMPLE3
EXAMPLE1:EXAMPLE2:EXAMPLE3
EXAMPLE1:EXAMPLE2:EXAMPLE3

I want to use grep to change it to look like this

EXAMPLE2:EXAMPLE3

Basically I want to take out the first part before the :

If someone could please tell me how to do this it would be greatly appreciated.

Possible duplicate of [How to grep and replace](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15402770/how-to-grep-and-replace) — tripleee, Jun 11 '16 at 08:08
Do you want to take out all first fields or only when it contains `EXAMPLE1` at the start of the line. In that case you can use something like `sed 's/^EXAMPLE1://' textfile`. — Walter A, Jun 12 '16 at 14:39

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 11 '16 at 06:59

2

You can use the cut utility to filter out columns given a delimiter.

In this example, the delimiter is : and you want every column starting with the second:

$ cut -d: -f2- < input.txt

answered Jun 11 '16 at 06:59

Bo Borgerson

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 11 '16 at 06:56

1

You can use -o flag to select the part of the input which matches a regex in grep.

Example

$ grep -o "[^:]*:[^:]*$" input
EXAMPLE2:EXAMPLE3
EXAMPLE2:EXAMPLE3
EXAMPLE2:EXAMPLE3

answered Jun 11 '16 at 06:56

nu11p01n73R

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Jun 11 '16 at 10:07

0

Another way to do this. Hope this helps.

awk -F":" '{printf "%s:%s\n" ,$1,$2}' file.txt

Output

EXAMPLE1:EXAMPLE2
EXAMPLE1:EXAMPLE2
EXAMPLE1:EXAMPLE2

answered Jun 11 '16 at 10:07

sumitya

score -1 · Answer 4 · answered Jun 11 '16 at 10:31

-1

Here it is:

cut -d':' -f2,3 filename

Output:

EXAMPLE2:EXAMPLE3
EXAMPLE2:EXAMPLE3
EXAMPLE2:EXAMPLE3

answered Jun 11 '16 at 10:31

sumit gupta

How is this different from the answer given by Bo Borgerson 4 hours ago? – Andreas Louv Jun 11 '16 at 11:28

4 Answers4