Very Computer

I have a file that has fields delimited by "|".  At the end of each line,
there is a "|" after the last field that I want to strip off.  Any ideas?

Thanks in advance,

T. Lah

: I have a file that has fields delimited by "|".  At the end of each line,
: there is a "|" after the last field that I want to strip off.  Any ideas?

cat filename |sed 's/\|$//p'

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That secret you've been guarding, isn't.

Close. First, sed reads from stdin by default so the `cat' is a waste. Also,
since you are quoting the entire sed command the `\' single character quote
is not necessary and the `p' should be g for `global'. Try:

sed 's/|$//g' infile > outfile

to read infile and write to outfile.

/d
--

: sed 's/|$//g' infile > outfile

The g is pointless there; a right-anchored search string can occur only once
(if at all) per line.  (If the expression's contents appear more than once,
only the last occurrence is right-anchored, so all the earlier ones fail to
match the search string.)

: I have a file that has fields delimited by "|".  At the end of each line,
: there is a "|" after the last field that I want to strip off.  Any ideas?

Not quite sure what you were after...pick the one you need.
1) If you wan't to strip the last character:

sed 's/\(.*\)|[ ]*$/\1/' file_in
             ^ ^^
             ^  add TAB char if you need it, now there is SPC only.
             ^grab last char

2) if you want to strip the *last* field

sed 's/\(.*\)|.*|[ ]*$/\1/' file_in
             ^^^^
             grab last field

The sed \( \)  stores contents to variable "1" and later \1 puts it back for
output. The 's/rexp/output_string/' cmd --> "s"ubstitutes rexp with
output_string

Cheers!

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