I am trying to replace string between two strings in a file with the command below. There could be any number of such patterns in the file. This is just an example.
sed 's/word1.*word2/word1/' 1.txt
There are two instances where 'word1' followed by 'word2' occurs in the sample source file I'm testing. Content of the 1.txt file
word1---sjdkkdkjdk---word2 I want this text----word1---jhfnkfnsjkdnf----word2 I need this also
Result is as below.
word1 I need this also
Expected Output :
word1 I want this text----word1 I need this also
Can anybody help me with this please?
I looked at other stack-overflow questionnaire but they discuss about replacing only one instance of the pattern.
Regular expressions are greedy - they match the longest possible string, so everything from the first 'word1' to the last 'word2'. Not sure if any version of sed supports non-greedy regexps... you could just use perl, though, which does:
perl -pe 's/word1.*?word2/word1/g' 1.txt
should do the trick. That ? changes the meaning of the prior * from 'match as many times as possible as long as the rest of the pattern matches' to 'match as few times as possible as long as the rest of the pattern matches'.
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