Multiple patterns in SED delete

[swartzism]

I would like to delete all lines starting with the following

- \t (tab)
- \n (newline)
- /
- (single space)
- =

I've tried `sed -n '/^\(\t\|\n\|/\| \|=\)$/d' OUTPUT.txt > test.txt` and combos of that to no avail. What am I doing wrong?

 

[jim mcnamara]

Without special syntax sed will not look at \n the way you want. Plus \t will not work. You have to hit the tab key and get what seem to be spaces.
egrep syntax is easier for me at the moment - but you can use the regex - note that a bunch of spaces is not spaces:
^$ is regex for a line that starts with \n, the | symbol is alternation.

egrep -v '(^$|^   |^ |^=|^/)' somefile > newfile

You can also use POSIX character classes like

^[:space:]

to get either \t or ' ' (space).

 

[NascentOxygen]

I would like to delete all lines starting with the following

- \t (tab)
- \n (newline)
- /
- (single space)
- =

I've tried `sed -n '/^\(\t\|\n\|/\| \|=\)$/d' OUTPUT.txt > test.txt` and combos of that to no avail. What am I doing wrong?

Are you wanting to do this in windows or linux? As jim mcnamara indicated, sed is not the best choice; sed brings more problems than you could imagine.