Question

How can we use sed to get the 4 characters between “Install ID:” and first space after XKCD, basically I want to extract “XKCD” string out of it

Install ID:          XKCD (8426200,8179503)

I tried using –

 echo "Install ID:          XKCD (8426200,8179503)" | sed -n 's/^.*ID:\(.*\)*$/\1/p'

but that gives me “XKCD (8426200,8179503)” instead of just XKCD. I am not able to figure out, how to hand the space part.

Answer 1

A couple of minor revisions to your attempt:

echo "Install ID:          XKCD (8426200,8179503)" | sed -n 's/^.*ID: *\([^ ]*\) .*$/\1/p'

or

echo "Install ID:          XKCD (8426200,8179503)" | awk '{print $3}'