Removing a sentence in a file containing a word

Removing a sentence that contains a specific word is a simple task with regular expressions. This recipe demonstrates techniques for solving similar problems.

Getting ready

sed is the best utility for making substitutions. This recipe uses sed to replace the matched sentence with a blank.

How to do it...

Let's create a file with some text to carry out the substitutions. Consider this example:

$ cat sentence.txt 
    Linux refers to the family of Unix-like computer operating systems   
    that use the Linux kernel. Linux can be installed on a wide variety   
    of computer hardware, ranging from mobile phones, tablet computers   
    and video game consoles, to mainframes and supercomputers. Linux is 
    predominantly known for its use in servers.

To remove the sentence containing the words mobile phones, use the following sed expression:

$ sed 's/ [^.]*mobile phones[^.]*\.//g' sentence.txt
    Linux refers to the family of Unix-like computer operating...