I'm getting "Invalid range end" for sed command in RHEL 8.3

Question

I was using this junk character filtering command in RHEL 6.10 which was working perfectly.

sed 's/[^][A-Za-z0-9\^`~!@#$%&*|\,:;{}()+=_-./ "<>?\/\\]//g'

However, in RHEL 8.3 below error happens.

sed: -e expression #1, char 54: Invalid range end

Any advice is much appreciated

Does this answer your question? [Hyphen and underscore not compatible in sed](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42743964/hyphen-and-underscore-not-compatible-in-sed) — Wiktor Stribiżew, Oct 20 '21 at 07:15
The `-` must be at the start or end of the bracket expression. You also need to remove all escapes except from one `/` (note you have one `/` unescaped). You do not need to double escape ``\`` inside a POSIX bracket expression. — Wiktor Stribiżew, Oct 20 '21 at 07:16
i've tried that, it will remove the ```-``` from the target file which we don't want. e.g: date 2021-10-17, we don't want to remove the ```-``` — mma, Oct 20 '21 at 08:25
No, ``'s/[^][A-Za-z0-9^`~!@#$%&*|,:;{}()+=_. "<>?\/\-]//g'`` won't remove hyphens. But I think now, you just want to keep alphanumeric and punctuation, right? Try `s/[^[:alnum:][:punct:]]//g` — Wiktor Stribiżew, Oct 20 '21 at 08:34
doesn't work. ```'s/[^][A-Za-z0-9^`~!@#$%&*|,:;{}()+=_. "<>?\/\-]//g'``` will nullify the whole file. — mma, Oct 21 '21 at 03:29
No idea what you mean by "nullify the file". Do you use `sed '...' file > file`? Pipe the result into the same file? — Wiktor Stribiżew, Oct 21 '21 at 06:41
sed -e 's/[^][A-Za-z0-9^`~!@#$%&*|,:;{}()+=_. "<>?\/\-]//g' file >file2 file2 is empty — mma, Oct 21 '21 at 08:13

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 21 '21 at 21:56

Use this script:

> cat test.txt
$jeden$
#pięć#
!łzy!
> sed 's/[^][A-Za-z0-9^`~!@#$%&*|,:;{}()+=_. "<>?\/\-]//g' test.txt > test2.txt
> cat test2.txt
$jeden$
#pi#
!zy!

All characters different from those mentioned in negated brackets are deleted from test file and saved in test2 file safely.

1 Answers1