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Asked: 2026-05-29T06:30:54+00:00

I’m trying to do my homework that is restricted to only using sed to

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I’m trying to do my homework that is restricted to only using sed to filter an input file to a certain format of output. Here is the input file (named stocks):

Symbol;Name;Volume
================================================

BAC;Bank of America Corporation Com;238,059,612
CSCO;Cisco Systems, Inc.;28,159,455
INTC;Intel Corporation;22,501,784
MSFT;Microsoft Corporation;23,363,118
VZ;Verizon Communications Inc. Com;5,744,385
KO;Coca-Cola Company (The) Common;3,752,569
MMM;3M Company Common Stock;1,660,453

================================================

And the output needs to be:

BAC, CSCO, INTC, MSFT, VZ, KO, MMM

I did come up with a solution, but it’s not efficient. Here is my sed script (named try.sed):

/.*;.*;[0-9].*/ { N
N
N
N
N
N
s/\(.*\);.*;.*\n\(.*\);.*;.*\n\(.*\);.*;.*\n\(.*\);.*;.*\n\(.*\);.*;.*\n\(.*\);.*;.*\n\(.*\);.*;.*/\1, \2, \3, \4, \5, \6, \7/gp
}

The command that I run on shell is:

$ sed -nf try.sed stocks

My question is, is there a better way of using sed to get the same result? The script I wrote only works with 7 lines of data. If the data is longer, I need to re-modify my script. I’m not sure how I can make it any better, so I’m here asking for help!

Thanks for any recommendations.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    One more way using sed:

    sed -ne '/^====/,/^====/ { /;/ { s/;.*$// ; H } }; $ { g ; s/\n// ; s/\n/, /g ; p }' stocks

    Output:

    BAC, CSCO, INTC, MSFT, VZ, KO, MMM

    Explanation:

    -ne               # Process each input line without printing and execute next commands...
/^====/,/^====/   # For all lines between these...
{
  /;/             # If line has a semicolon...
  { 
    s/;.*$//      # Remove characters from first semicolon until end of line.
    H             # Append content to 'hold space'.
  }
};
$                 # In last input line...
{
  g               # Copy content of 'hold space' to 'pattern space' to work with it.
  s/\n//          # Remove first newline character.
  s/\n/, /g       # substitute the rest with output separator, comma in this case.
  p               # Print to output.
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