Question

My input text is in this format

 aa5b    r1     12715
 r2     12221
 aa43b   ew     13721
 eb     122331
 aa4b    ff     1055440

Output must be

aa5    r1     12715
r2    12221
aa43   ew     13721
eb  122331
aa4    ff     1055440

I tried with

 awk -F " " '{print $1}' t1 | grep "^aa*" > t2|sed s/b//g t2

The problem with this code is that the input text is not having a fixed pattern.

Answer 1

What about this version with sed?

sed 's/^\(aa[0-9]*\)b/\1/' t1 > t2