Deleting users from info.txt

[Fiona M]

How can I delete the entire row that contains a user that I have identified as “bad”?

My code is in the attachment.
I have a file that contains only the names/uun of users that I have identified as bad.
For each user:
– if they are still in info.txt
then remove the entire row where the string matches

Currently it only deletes the string itself, nothing else.
From what I can find in shell scripting forums the command I used should delete the entire line which contains the substring specified in $USER for all instances in info.txt (globally).

What am I not seeing? I tried converting info.txt into a csv, but it seems even more complicated to delete an entire row in csv. I have replaced the tabs in info.txt with spaces, in case it doesn’t recognise the lines as rows because of the tabs. Nothing works.

Any help appreciated!

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[Catherine Lai]

You need to expand the sed command to match the entire line, eg. ^$USER .*$ ($ here means the end of the line, ^ mean the beginning of the line). But there’s also a tricky thing with sed and newlines, so since you want to delete the whole line, you can use the d flag, i.e. delete:

sed -i '/^$USER .*$/d' info.txt

This assumes that it’s just spaces separating the columns.

There are some more examples and explanation of the flags (probably too much info) here:
https://www.gnu.org/software/sed/manual/sed.html

cheers,
Catherine

[Fiona M]

Thank you! This solved the problem of deleting the entire line from info.txt

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