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

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

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

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 store the unmodified file as file.bak, and delete the given lines.

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

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.

and awk as well

awk 'NR!~/^(5|10|25)$/' file

$ cat foo
1
2
3
4
5
$ sed -e '2d;4d' foo
1
3
5
$ 

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 ''.

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<714) || ((nl>1025)&&(nl<1029)) ) print  $0}'
 OriginFile.dat > 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 && 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      |
+-----+------+----------+------------+

---

The shortest, deleting the first line in sed

sed -i '1d' file

As Brian states here, <address><command> is used, <address> is <1> and <command> <d>.

cat -b /etc/passwd | sed -E 's/^( )+(<line_number>)(\t)(.*)/--removed---/g;s/^( )+([0-9]+)(\t)//g'

cat -b -> print lines with numbers

s/^( )+(<line_number>)(\t)(.*)//g -> replace line number to null (remove line)

s/^( )+([0-9]+)(\t)//g #remove numbers the cat printed