Remove a variety of lines in a text file

Question

I've been trying to implement a bash script that reads from wordnet's online database and have been wondering if there is a way to remove a variety text files with one command.

Example FileDump:

**** Noun ****
(n)hello, hullo, hi, howdy, how-do-you-do (an expression of greeting) "every morning they exchanged polite hellos"
**** Verb ****
(v)run (move fast by using one's feet, with one foot off the ground at any given time) "Don't run--you'll be out of breath"; "The children ran to the store"
**** Adjective ****
(adj)running ((of fluids) moving or issuing in a stream) "as mountain stream with freely running water"; "hovels without running water"

I just need to remove the lines which describe aspects of grammar eg

**** Noun ****
**** Verb ****
**** Adjective ****

So that I have a clean file with only definitions of the words:

(n)hello, hullo, hi, howdy, how-do-you-do (an expression of greeting) "every morning they exchanged polite hellos"
(v)run (move fast by using one's feet, with one foot off the ground at any given time) "Don't run--you'll be out of breath"; "The children ran to the store"
(adj)running ((of fluids) moving or issuing in a stream) "as mountain stream with freely running water"; "hovels without running water"

The * symbols around the grammatical terms are tripping me up in sed.

Answer 1

If you want to select whole lines from a file based just on the content of those lines, grep is probably the most suitable tool available. However, some characters, such as your stars, have special meanings to grep , so need to be "escaped" with a backslash. This will print just the lines starting with four stars and a space:

grep "^\*\*\*\* " textfile

However, you want to keep the lines which don't match that, so you need the -v option for grep which does just that: prints the lines which don't match the pattern.

grep -v "\*\*\*\* " textfile

That should give you what you want.

Answer 2

sed '/^\*\{4\} .* \*\{4\}$/d'

还是有点松

sed '/^*\{4\}/d'

Answer 3

 sed 's/^*.*//g' test | grep .

Answer 4

# awk '!/^\*\*+/' file
(n)hello, hullo, hi, howdy, how-do-you-do (an expression of greeting) "every morning they exchanged polite hellos"
(v)run (move fast by using one's feet, with one foot off the ground at any given time) "Don't run--you'll be out of breath"; "The children ran to the store"
(adj)running ((of fluids) moving or issuing in a stream) "as mountain stream with freely running water"; "hovels without running water"