Hi there,
I have a file that contains a list of names. I need to select a certain name and chop it down in size but this name occurs here and there in my list and i need to chop it down without changing where it occurs in the list of names. Confused? Here is an example:

List of names
Mandy1234
Joe
Sean
Jeff
Mandy3467
John
Sarah
Mandy9987
etc....

I need to chop all the Mandy#### down to Mandy without changing the order of the list. I am very new to Unix and i have looked at awk and sed and grep but i can't seem to use them in a way that doesn't change the order of my list.
If anyone can help me i'd really appreciate it!
Ta lots,
Rho

one way would be to build it into an if statement

eg

cat /dev/null > newfile

for line in `cat file`
do

if [ `grep Mandy $line | wc -l` -ne 0]
then
"Carry out you sed command to alter appearance of mandy" >> newfile
else
cat $line >> newfile
fi

done

Enjoy ..

Sed should do all of this for you...

sed '/^Mandy[0-9]*$/s/[0-9]*$//' yourFile > newFile

This says that if the line begins with 'Mandy' followed by any number of 0-9s, substitute the numeric portion for an empty string.

HTH