Extracting character range form longline with sed or awk or grep?

Question

So i have a 1 long line with characters, for example numbers[1-1024] in one line(no "\n", "\t" and "\b"):

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 ... 1024

How do i extract and print characters for example exactly 55 characters after 46? So output would be:

47 48 49 ... 101

Thanks.

Answer 1

You can use the cut utility. For your example, the following command will work.

cut -f 47-101 -d " " file_with_long_line

You can also specify byte or character positions, or change the delimiter string, depending on your input.

Answer 2

Why not use cut?

cut -d ' ' -f 46-101

Answer 3

If you really want to use awk instead of cut, you could set RS=" ", and process relatively normally from there, with each number as a separate record, just like it was on a line by itself.

Answer 4

This looks for the string "Galeon-2b" and outputs the next 55 characters.

sed -n 's/.*Galeon-2b\(.\{55\}\).*/\1/p' backup.sql