Linux – How to use sed or awk to remove text

sed doesn't know about \d and non-greedy matches. You don't need to use cat. This should work:

sed 's/.*sourceNodeId="\([0-9]\+\)".*/\1/' file

Some sed versions are picky about wanting a -e (it will work even if it's not required):

sed -e 's/.*sourceNodeId="\([0-9]\+\)".*/\1/' file

If your sed supports -r you can skip the escaping:

sed -er 's/.*sourceNodeId="([0-9]+)".*/\1/' file

Solaris generally doesn't have the GNU version of anything by default. This means that the options and arguments you supply will often have to be different to get the same behaviour out of utilities like sed.

Sometimes it will not be possible to get the same behaviour at all, for instance, sed -i won't work on Solaris unless you have installed the GNU version of sed.

From memory, the sed on Solaris supports the "basic" set of regular expressions and this doesn't include the + modifier. You can simulate a + like this:

sed 's/[^0-9][^0-9]*//'

Or you can just use a * for this case:

sed 's/[^0-9]*//'

Solaris usually also has the BSD versions of these utilities installed under /usr/ucb. they are often very similar but occasionally have important differences, such as with ps.