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I need to remove a 3 character substring from a document, which could be located anywhere in the document, eg.

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bla bla bla -ri bla bla bla
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I would like to search for -ri and remove it to obtain

text
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bla bla bla bla bla bla
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If this were a fixed line and character number I'm pretty sure I could excise it with sed or cut, but I am not sure how to do it if the line and character position are variable. Is this possible?

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2 Answers 2

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You don't need to know the line number, you can have sed unconditionally (try to) modify each and every line:

$ sed -e 's/-ri //' < input > output

It gets more awkward if you have matches on multiple lines, and want to handle only some of them.

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2

sed can be used for tasks like this:

sed 's/-ri //g' path/to/file

will find every occurance of -ri and replace it with nothing using the s substitute operate in sed

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