Remove everything after a certain string

Question

I though this was going to be a simple task but I am having some trouble with it.

Sample input

$ cat file.txt
Brown Potatoes with Cheese
Yellow Potatoes with Sugar and Cheese

I would like to use sed to remove everything after the string with

So the output would be

Brown Potatoes 
Yellow Potatoes

I've tried this regex but it doesn't seem to work.

sed -i -e "s/with.*//g" file.txt

Where did I go wrong?

do you get correct output displayed if you removed the `-i` option? in that case, see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5694228/sed-in-place-flag-that-works-both-on-mac-bsd-and-linux ... also, a minor suggestion, you might want to remove the space before `with` as well — Sundeep, Oct 23 '17 at 08:56
If I remove the -i option I get the correct output. I am puzzled. — Tomáš Janulík, Oct 23 '17 at 08:58

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 23 '17 at 08:52

4

mathb@Balu:~$ sed -i.bak 's/with.*//g' file.txt
mathb@Balu:~$ cat file.txt
Brown Potatoes

Yellow Potatoes
mathb@Balu:~$

answered Oct 23 '17 at 08:52

mathB

Hey, if this answers your question, do accept it as answer :) – mathB Oct 23 '17 at 09:45
Oh, I am sorry. I am new here. Accepted now. Thank you once again. :) – Tomáš Janulík Oct 23 '17 at 10:47

1 Answers1