I am looking for a way to delete all lines that do not follow a specific pattern (from a txt file).
Pattern which I need to keep the lines for:
x//x/x/x/5/x/
x could be any amount of characters, numbers or special characters.
5 is always a combination of alphanumeric - 5 characters - e.g Xf1Lh, always appears after the 5th forward slash.
/ are actual forward slashes.
Input:
abc//a/123/gds:/4AdFg/f3dsg34/
y35sdf//x/gd:df/j5je:/x/x/x
yh//x/x/x/5Fsaf/x/
45wuhrt//x/x/dsfhsdfs54uhb/
5ehys//srt/fd/ab/cde/fg/x/x
Desired output:
abc//a/123/gds:/4AdFg/f3dsg34/
yh//x/x/x/5Fsaf/x/
grep selects lines according to a regular expression and your x//x/x/x/5/x/ just needs minor changes to make it into a regular expression:
$ grep -E '.*//.*/.*/.*/[[:alnum:]]{5}/.*/' file
abc//a/123/gds:/4AdFg/f3dsg34/
yh//x/x/x/5Fsaf/x/
Explanation:
"x could be any amount of characters, numbers or special characters". In a regular expression that is .* where . means any character and * means zero or more of the preceding character (which in this case is .).
"5 is always a combination of alphanumeric - 5 characters". In POSIX regular expressions, [[:alnum:]] means any alphanumeric character. {5} means five of the preceding. [[:alnum:]] is unicode-safe.
One issue is how x should be interpreted. In the above, x was allowed to be any character. As triplee points out, however, another reasonable interpretation is that x should be any character except /. In that case:
grep -E '[^/]*//[^/]*/[^/]*/[^/]*/[[:alnum:]]{5}/[^/]*/' file
Also, we might want this regex to match only complete lines. In that case, we can either surround the regex with ^ an $ or we can use grep's -x option:
grep -xE '[^/]*//[^/]*/[^/]*/[^/]*/[[:alnum:]]{5}/[^/]*/' file