Question

1. What command would you give to print (display on the screen) the contents of commented.cpp with all inline comments removed (and no other changes to the text)? I need to do this with the sed command, and as you know all inline comments in cpp start with "//".

Answer 1

Solution :

commented.cpp

#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
//Firt line
int main()
{
//Second line
cout<<"HelloWorld"<<endl;
//Third line
return 0;
}
//Last line

OUTPUT:

Answer 2

To remove all inline comments starting with "//" from the file "commented.cpp" using the sed command, you can use the following command:

bashCopy codesed 's/\/\/.*//' commented.cpp

Explanation:

• sed: The command for stream editor.

• s: The substitute command in sed to perform search and replace.

• \/\/: The pattern to search for. Since "/" is a special character in sed, we need to escape it with "" to match "//" literally.

• .*: The pattern to match any characters after "//" until the end of the line.

• //.*//: The replacement pattern is empty, which means we are effectively removing the inline comments.

Running this command will display the contents of "commented.cpp" with all inline comments removed on the screen. Note that this command only displays the modified output on the screen and does not change the original file. If you want to save the modified content to a new file, you can use the -i flag with sed:

bashCopy codesed -i 's/\/\/.*//' commented.cpp

This will perform the same inline comment removal directly in the "commented.cpp" file. Make sure to create a backup of the file before using the -i flag to avoid accidental data loss.