How to understand this sed command

[lehe]

Hi,
I am reading a command in shell script using sed:
echo $1 | sed -e "s/^[^=]*=\(.*\)$/\1/"

what I don't understand is the sed command. I only know it tries to substitute "^[^=]*=\(.*\)$/" with "\1" and 1 is one of the positional parameters got from invoking the shell script, but have little idea about what the two things are.

Thanks for help!

[kakariko81280]

^ Match the beginning of the line
[^=]* match zero or more characters that aren't "="
= match "="
\( identify this bit for \1
.* match zero or more of anything
\) end the identified bit.

So it is looking for the first = sign in the input and removing everything before it.

chris@angua:~$ echo "abc=123" | sed -e "s/^[^=]*=\(.*\)$/\1/"
123
chris@angua:~$ echo "abc=123=xyz" | sed -e "s/^[^=]*=\(.*\)$/\1/"
123=xyz

[sathiya]

good resource ... good coders code, great reuse