2

Consider a text.txt file having the form

25 1 4 5 2 19 38

21 0 8 8 7 7 61

<clus scale = "125"> 1 3 2</clus>

25 3 1.63 123 56 12 38

21 123 12.3 12.1 1.5 2.67 3.77

<clus scale = "227"> 5 6 2</clus>

How can I leave only numeric (and empty) rows using the terminal, i.e. to convert a file to

25 1 4 5 2 19 38

21 0 8 8 7 7 61

25 3 1.63 123 56 12 38

21 123 12.3 12.1 1.5 2.67 3.77
2
  • How do you define "numeric"? Your output also has empty lines. Do you want to keep all lines that have only numbers and whitespace and all empty lines?
    – terdon
    Commented Apr 23, 2019 at 8:21
  • @terdon : yes, that's what I would like to have.
    – John Taylor
    Commented Apr 23, 2019 at 8:22

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
6

Use grep:

grep '^[0-9. ]*$' text.txt

or to also exclude empty lines from the match, use

grep -E '^[0-9. ]+$' text.txt

This will select lines with numbers, dot and space.
You can also reverse the pattern, by excluding lines with for example < using grep -v:

grep -v "<" text.txt
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  • 2
    Note that your second grep won't exclude lines with only whitespace, it will only exclude lines with no characters. And you might want to include - for negative numbers.
    – terdon
    Commented Apr 23, 2019 at 8:26

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