[NTLUG:Discuss] removing text: fighting tr and regex

[Victor Brilon]

On Jul 6, 2006, at 3:03 AM, Richard Geoffrion wrote:

> echo "jdoe at example.com (John Doe)" | sed --expression s/\(.*?\)//g

You're almost there:
echo "jdoe at example.com (John Doe)" | sed -e s/\(.*\)//g

To badly paraphrase "The Princess Bride": You keep using the ?  
qualifier, I don't think it does what you think it does :)

If you truly want to use the ? qualifier to do what it's supposed to  
do (i.e., match the minimal number of chars), just use perl like this:
echo "jdoe at example.com (John Doe)" | perl -n -e 's/\(.*?\)//g;print'

Victor