Question

I have a file containing lines like

insert into table_name    (params1,params2,params3)  values (43044,'x',23547003);
insert into table_name    (params1,params2,params3)  values (43024,'y',26557003);
.....

I want to remove the first column/value pair. i.e. this is the desired output.

insert into table_name    (params2,params3)  values ('x',23547003); 
insert into table_name    (params2,params3)  values ('y',26557003);

How can I do this?

here is what I did till now

cat file_name | sed 's/params1,//g' 

This removes the params1 but how do I remove the number after values?

Tl;dr

change from insert into table_name (params2,params3) values (43024,'y',26557003); to insert into table_name (params2,params3) values ('y',26557003);

Answer 1

You can use:

sed -e 's/params1,//' -e 's/values ([^,]*,/values (/'

as per the following transcript:

pax> cat infile
insert into table_name    (params1,params2,params3)  values (43044,'x',23547003);
insert into table_name    (params1,params2,params3)  values (43024,'y',26557003);

pax> sed -e 's/params1,//' -e 's/values ([^,]*,/values (/' infile
insert into table_name    (params2,params3)  values (x,23547003);
insert into table_name    (params2,params3)  values (y,26557003);

The first sed argument you already have. The second simply finds the first string made up of:

• the string "values (";
• zero or more non-comma characters (greedy match, as many as possible); and
• a comma.

Then it replaces that with "values (" which effectively gets rid of the first argument of the values.