[SOLVED] How to delete second occurrence from a line using Unix

Issue

I have below data in file

They used to carry lots of treats
but now they don’t have any sweets.
And so, if you’re in need of candy,
please don’t visit Mrs. Mandy. He is working in office.But will be late from office

For example :

using this following command i got the line which as both keywords in same line

grep "Mandy" file.txt | grep "office"

The above command as given me below line as output

please don’t visit Mrs. Mandy. He is working in office.But will be late from office

Now from above line which i got as an output need to delete second occurrence keyword : office and print below output

Expected output :

please don’t visit Mrs. Mandy. He is working in office.But will be late from 

How to achieve the above expected output ?

Solution

sed can do that using s/office//2. On top of that, you can combine the entire pipeline into a single command.

sed -n '/Mandy/s/office//2p' file.txt

Explanation:

In above command there are 2 sed commands.

1. /Mandy/ runs the next command only on lines containing Mandy.

2. s/office//2p deletes (substitute with the empty string) the 2nd occurrence of office in those lines and prints them afterwards.

Answered By - Socowi