How to delete the first and last two characters from a text file using sed?

Question

I have a text file like this

abcdefg
abcdefg
abcdefg
abcdefg

How to delete the first and last two characters from each line with sed? I would like to get the output like this

bcde
bcde
bcde
bcde

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered May 11 '12 at 08:48

4

sed  's/^.\(.*\)..$/\1/'  file

answered May 11 '12 at 08:48

codaddict

1

note: this won't work if the string has less than 3 characters. – dogbane May 11 '12 at 08:51

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered May 11 '12 at 09:21

0

This might work for you:

sed 's/^.\|..$//g' file

answered May 11 '12 at 09:21

potong

2 Answers2