I know there are lots of questions about it but I can't get it working.
I want to clean a group (for instance root) in /etc/group with sed or awk. So I need to delete everything after root:*:0:
I tried to remove it with:
cat /etc/group | awk '!p;/^root:*:0:/{p=1}'
and
cat /etc/group | sed 's/root\:\*\:0\:.*//'
but sed removes the whole root line.
What am i doing wrong?
You can use an address with sed to limit what lines to act on:
sed '/^root:/s/:[^:]*$/:/' /etc/group
Which, for the line(s) starting with root:, removes all characters after the last : in the line.
(/etc/group records only have 4 :-delimited columns, so it strips the last one with all the group members in it)
root:foo:bar, not just lines starting with root:*:0: as the OP says they want.
/etc/group is extremely unlikely to have more than one root group, and it's not going to look notably different (Mine is root:x:0:; I wonder what OS uses an asterisk for the password field).
With awk:
awk 'BEGIN{OFS=FS=":"} $1=="root"{$NF=""} 1' /etc/group
Split fields on : and set the last field to an empty string if the first field is root.
Apart from the question whether this should really be done using simple text-processing tools, your sed call clears the entire line because the "substitute" command replaces the entire found pattern with the replacement (in your case the empty string).
The minimal modification to get your sed line to work would be to write
sed 's/root:\*:0:.*/root:*:0:/' /etc/group
or, using capture groups,
sed 's/\(root:\*:0:\).*/\1/' /etc/group
(and btw, cat is never necessary when using sed or awk, just provide the file as command-line argument).
The solution presented by @Shawn is however more elegant in that respect.
everything afterdo you mean a) everything after that string on the line containing it, or b) every line in the file after the line containing that string, or c) everything after that string on the line containing that string plus every line after it, or d) something else? Is the*in your example supposed to be literal or the regexp repetition metachar? Please edit your question to show concise, testable sample input and expected output to help clarify your requirements and give us something we can test a potential solution against.