Question

I have a text file with 50k lines like this

word1 1 23
word2 43 23
word3 197
word4

and need a way to make it look like this:

word1
word2
word3
word4

So I need a way to remove every character behind the first space in each line.
How do I do this?

Answer 1

Multiple solutions.

Solution 1: Vim

Open the file in vim, then run:

:%s/\s.*//g

Solution 2: sed

sed "s/ .*//g" < input_file > output_file

Cannot do this on windows tho.

Solution 3: Excel/Calc/Numbers

Import the file in OpenOffice/MSOffice/etc.
You can set space as a delimiter.
But this is a slower and less fun. 🙂