[regex] Non greedy (reluctant) regex matching in sed?

There is still hope to solve this using pure (GNU) sed. Despite this is not a generic solution in some cases you can use "loops" to eliminate all the unnecessary parts of the string like this:

sed -r -e ":loop" -e 's|(http://.+)/.*|\1|' -e "t loop"
  • -r: Use extended regex (for + and unescaped parenthesis)
  • ":loop": Define a new label named "loop"
  • -e: add commands to sed
  • "t loop": Jump back to label "loop" if there was a successful substitution

The only problem here is it will also cut the last separator character ('/'), but if you really need it you can still simply put it back after the "loop" finished, just append this additional command at the end of the previous command line:

-e "s,$,/,"

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