Subject: Re: bug#28316: tr -d
From: Eric Blake <[email-masked]>
To: John Pateman <[email-masked]>, [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 1 Sep 2017 12:09:08 -0500
List-Id: <debbugs-submit.debbugs.gnu.org>

tag 28316 notabug
thanks

On 09/01/2017 06:28 AM, John Pateman wrote:
> macOS 10.12.
> 
> Problems with tr -d
> Removal of character 'd' from test string when tr invoked with -d
> incantation.
> 
> Example
> 
> [abc@xyx] ~ $ echo uuid:8ddddb8d5 | tr -d 'uuid:'

That asks tr to delete all individual instances of 'd', 'i', 'u', and
':' in the input string, regardless of their context.

> 
> Expected output
> 8ddddb8d5
> 
> Actual output
> 8b85

The behavior you observed was correct. To get what you want, you need to
use a tool that can do substring removal, rather than individual
character removal; sed and awk are such tools:

$ echo uuid:8ddddb8d5 | sed s/uuid://
8ddddb8d5

As such, I'm tagging this as not a bug; but feel free to reply with any
further questions on the topic.

-- 
Eric Blake, Principal Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc.           +1-919-301-3266
Virtualization:  qemu.org | libvirt.org