[Discuss] SED question

[dsr at tao.merseine.nu (Dan Ritter)]

On Tue, Oct 04, 2011 at 11:45:22AM -0400, Nathan Meyers wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 04, 2011 at 11:35:00AM -0400, Chandler, Scott wrote:
> > I've got a script running a sed command that I need help interpreting. The line is "sed '$d' file1.txt > file2.txt".
> > 
> > I understand that sed '$d' file1.txt removes the last line from the file but will the resultant file (file2.txt) contain only the last line from file1.txt or will it contain everything *except* the last line from file1.txt?
> 
> Hello Scott,
> 
> The output of sed (what ends up in file2.txt) is the result of applying
> the edit - in this case, it will be the input file contents with the
> last line removed.

Another way to do this particular thing would be:

head -n -1 file1.txt > file2.txt

If you wanted to only keep the last line, tail -1 is your
friend.

-dsr-

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