Truncate to end of line after a specific string

[threezerous]

I thought this would be easy to find on google or figure out myself. But either I am not looking properly or missing the obvious. Apologies in advance if this has been replied elsewhere.

I want to delete all characters to end of line after a specific string in a file.

So my file contents are such (with variable length lines)

aaaabbbbbbbbbbbcccc.hrpt <www-alpha>
dddddbbbbbbbbcccc.hrpt <www-beta>
pppppppppppppppbbbbbbbbbbcccc.hrpt <www-gamma>
xxxbbbbbcccc.hrpt <www-alpha>

The common string above starts with is '.hrpt <www-'
I want to delete everything and inclusive of the common string....so my output file would look like

aaaabbbbbbbbbbbcccc
dddddbbbbbbbbcccc
pppppppppppppppbbbbbbbbbbcccc
xxxbbbbbcccc

I can easily do this using excel on a windows machine, but would like to try using shell scripting.
I played around a bit with sed command with little success.

Thanks much for any assistance.

[atreyu]

use sed. in a nutshell:

s/regexp/replacement/

put what you want to match on in regexp and put what you want to replace it with in replacement.

in the regexp, along with the string you want to match on, you can use a "." to match any character and a "*" to match more than one character, and the "$" to match the end of the string.

use it like this:

echo "some string"|sed -e 's/regexp/replacement/'

[threezerous]

Would you mind posting some example of regexp and how to use it? The expression I want to replace (or truncate) has spaces in it and the comand below appears to ignore everything after spaces.

Here is the command I ran and the output

echo "prof_dir/symcan/articles/blah/UAT/8045.xml: <attr>2010</attr>" | sed -e '.xml: <attr>2010</attr>/ '
Output --> prof_dir/symcan/articles/blah/UAT/8045attr>/attr>

I am trying to replace ".xml: <attr>2010</attr>" with a space (Basically that is last part of the string and I want to get rid of it.

Thanks much for your suggestion and help.

use sed. in a nutshell:

s/regexp/replacement/

put what you want to match on in regexp and put what you want to replace it with in replacement.

in the regexp, along with the string you want to match on, you can use a "." to match any character and a "*" to match more than one character, and the "$" to match the end of the string.

use it like this:

echo "some string"|sed -e 's/regexp/replacement/'

[threezerous]

I was able to make it work with

echo string | cut -f1 -d\.;done
(delete everything after dot)

Thanks

Would you mind posting some example of regexp and how to use it? The expression I want to replace (or truncate) has spaces in it and the comand below appears to ignore everything after spaces.

Here is the command I ran and the output

echo "prof_dir/symcan/articles/blah/UAT/8045.xml: <attr>2010</attr>" | sed -e '.xml: <attr>2010</attr>/ '
Output --> prof_dir/symcan/articles/blah/UAT/8045attr>/attr>

I am trying to replace ".xml: <attr>2010</attr>" with a space (Basically that is last part of the string and I want to get rid of it.

Thanks much for your suggestion and help.

[atreyu]

Would you mind posting some example of regexp and how to use it? The expression I want to replace (or truncate) has spaces in it and the comand below appears to ignore everything after spaces.

Here is the command I ran and the output

echo "prof_dir/symcan/articles/blah/UAT/8045.xml: <attr>2010</attr>" | sed -e '.xml: <attr>2010</attr>/ '
Output --> prof_dir/symcan/articles/blah/UAT/8045attr>/attr>

I am trying to replace ".xml: <attr>2010</attr>" with a space (Basically that is last part of the string and I want to get rid of it.

Thanks much for your suggestion and help.

i see you already worked it out w/cut, but here is what i would have suggested:

echo $string|sed -e 's|\.xml: <attr>2010</attr>.*$||'

note that sed is using the pipe ("|") as the separator instead of the forward slash. that way, you can use the forward slash as part of the regexp.