sed or awk question - Remove text after colon

[GrouchyGaijin]

Hi Guys,

I would like to remove the text after a colon on a specific line in a text file.

The file looks like this for example:


Stuff I want to keep : January 31, 2014
More stuff : February 2, 2014
Yet more stuff : March 10, 2014


How could I remove the text after the colon from line 2 so that I end up with



Stuff I want to keep : January 31, 2014
More stuff :
Yet more stuff : March 10, 2014


I appreciate the help!

[r-senior]

There may be more elegant ways:


sed '2 s/:.*/:/' yourfile.txt

[GrouchyGaijin]

Thank you - that works perfectly...
except now I have another question.

Basically this is for a script to update a due date on a todo list.

I can append text to an item on the list easily enough.



read -p "Enter the task number: " tasknumber
read -p "Enter the due date: " duedate
/home/gg/scripts/todo.sh append $tasknumber Due Date: $duedate


When I try to stick the $tasknumber variable (which is a line number), the date is not removed.
If I use the actual line number instead of the variable, the date is removed.

I've tried with both single quotes and double quotes:


sed "$tasknumber s/:.*/:/" /home/gg/Dropbox/todo/todo.txt


and



sed '$tasknumber s/:.*/:/' /home/gg/Dropbox/todo/todo.txt


Any idea what the problem is?

Thanks again!

[r-senior]

The variable works OK for me with double-quotes on the sed to allow the variable substitution:


$ read -p 'Task: ' tasknumber
Task: 2
$ sed "$tasknumber s/:.*/:/" temp.txt
Stuff I want to keep : January 31, 2014
More stuff :
Yet more stuff : March 10, 2014


So it must be something to do with how you are calling that script.

[GrouchyGaijin]

I think you are right.
It works for me when I run it just in the terminal but not in the script.
I also noticed that even though I have the path to the text file, the changes don't see to actually be written.
In the terminal I'll see the truncated task, but if I run the list tasks command


todo.sh ls

I still see the unmodified task, that is with the original date.

[steeldriver]

Are you using the -i switch in your sed commands? otherwise it just writes the modified file to stdout



-i[SUFFIX], --in-place[=SUFFIX]

edit files in place (makes backup if extension supplied)

[GrouchyGaijin]

Dou!! ;)