Delete specific line number s from a text file using sed

Question

I want to delete one or more specific line numbers from a file  How would I do this using sed

User · Accepted Answer

If you want to delete lines 5 through 10 and 12:

sed -e '5,10d;12d' file

This will print the results to the screen. If you want to save the results to the same file:

sed -i.bak -e '5,10d;12d' file

This will back the file up to file.bak, and delete the given lines.

Note: Line numbers start at 1. The first line of the file is 1, not 0.

User · Answer

You can delete a particular single line with its line number by sed -i  33d  file  This will delete the line on 33 line number and save the updated file

User · Answer

cat foo 1 2 3 4 5   sed -e  2d 4d  foo 1 3 5

User · Answer

I would like to propose a generalization with awk    When the file is made by blocks of a fixed size  and the lines to delete are repeated for each block   awk can work fine in such a way  awk   nl   NR-1  2000  1  if    nl lt 714       nl gt 1025  amp  amp  nl lt 1029     print   0    OriginFile dat  gt  MyOutputCuttedFile dat   In this example the size for the block is 2000 and I want to print the lines  1  713  and  1026  1029     NR is the variable used by awk to store the current line number    gives the remainder  or modulus  of the division of two integers  nl   NR-1  BLOCKSIZE  1 Here we write in the variable nl the line number inside the current block   see below     and  amp  amp  are the logical operator OR and AND  print  0 writes the full line     Why   NR-1  BLOCKSIZE  1   NR-1  We need a shift of one because 1 3 1  2 3 2  but 3 3 0     1   We add again 1 because we want to restore the desired order    ----- ------ ---------- ------------    NR    NR 3    NR-1  3    NR-1  3 1    ----- ------ ---------- ------------     1     1        0           1           2     2        1           2           3     0        2           3           4     1        0           1         ----- ------ ---------- ------------

User · Answer

and awk as well  awk  NR     5 10 25     file

User · Answer

This is very often a symptom of an antipattern  The tool which produced the line numbers may well be replaced with one which deletes the lines right away  For example   grep -nh error logfile   cut -d  -f1   deletelines logfile    where deletelines is the utility you are imagining you need  is the same as  grep -v error logfile   Having said that  if you are in a situation where you genuinely need to perform this task  you can generate a simple sed script from the file of line numbers   Humorously  but perhaps slightly confusingly  you can do this with sed   sed  s   d   linenumbers   This accepts a file of line numbers  one per line  and produces  on standard output  the same line numbers with d appended after each   This is a valid sed script  which we can save to a file  or  on some platforms  pipe to another sed instance   sed  s   d   linenumbers   sed -f - logfile   On some platforms  sed -f does not understand the option argument - to mean standard input  so you have to redirect the script to a temporary file  and clean it up when you are done  or maybe replace the lone dash with  dev stdin or  proc  pid fd 1 if your OS  or shell  has that   As always  you can add -i before the -f option to have sed edit the target file in place  instead of producing the result on standard output  On  BSDish platforms  including OSX  you need to supply an explicit argument to -i as well  a common idiom is to supply an empty argument  -i

[unix] Delete specific line number(s) from a text file using sed?

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