Question

I’m trying to tool around with some scripts I have inherited at work and wanted to see if someone could decipher what this expression is attempting to accomplish:

|sed -e 's#\(.\{36\}\)\(.*\)#\1|\2#g' | sed -e 's#\(.\{49\}\)\(.*\)#\1|\2#g'

I have tried to reverse engineer this via the reference manuals and google, but have not been successful.

Thanks!

Answer 1

This is two sed statements. The first inserts a pipe character (‘|’) after the first 36 characters of the line, the second inserts a pipe character after the first 49 characters (including the pipe it inserted in the first step).

As far as I can tell, these could be written more concisely with the same effect:

|sed -e 's#\(.\{36\}\)#\1|#' | sed -e 's#\(.\{49\}\)#\1|#'