Sed: Deleting all content matching a pattern

Posted by Svish on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Svish
Published on 2010-04-07T14:04:16Z Indexed on 2010/04/07 14:13 UTC
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plist

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sed

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mac

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unix

I have some plist files on mac os x that I would like to shrink. They have a lot of <dict> with <key> and values. One of these keys is a thumbnail which has a <data> value with base64 encoded binary (I think). I would like to remove this key and value.

I was thinking this could maybe be done by sed, but I don't really know how to use it and it seems like sed only works on a line-by-line basis?

Either way I was hoping someone could help me out. In the file I would like to delete everything that matches the following pattern or something close to that:

<key>Thumbnail<\/key>[^<]*<\/data>

In the file it looks like this:

            // Other keys and values

            <key>Thumbnail</key>
            <data>
            TU0AKgAAOEi25Pqx3/ip2fak0vOdzPCVxu2RweuPv+mLu+mIt+aGtuaEtOSB

            ...

            dCBBcHBsZSBDb21wdXRlciwgSW5jLiwgMjAwNQAAAAA=
            </data>

            // Other keys and values

Anyone know how I could do this? Also, if there are any better tools that I can use in the terminal to do this, I would like to know about that as well :)

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