From: Moritz Bunkus <moritz@bunkus.org>

...

btw why is the above sed expr. wrong? i don't know sed enough but at first look it seems to be correct.

I don't know why, but it works if you replace the + with *...

You beat me to it ;) I was just going to mention that sed -e 's/^\([0-9]*\)\.\([0-9]*\).*/\1\2/' works fine. echo "1.2 beta" | sed -e 's/^\([0-9]*\)\.\([0-9]*\).*/\1\2/' 12 echo "1.1" | sed -e 's/^\([0-9]*\)\.\([0-9]*\).*/\1\2/' 11 I like it :) Cheers, Steven Schultz