Using sed get substring between two double quotes

I have a file

xyz... rsync: "/home/path/to/file": Permission denied (13) rsync:
"/home/path/to/file1": Permission denied (13) rsync:
"/home/path/to/file2": Permission denied (13) rsync:
"/home/path/to/file3": Permission denied (13)

Now I want to extract the file paths only and store it to another file. Output file is like:

/home/path/to/file 
/home/path/to/file1 
/home/path/to/file2
/home/path/to/file3

Using sed or awk how can I do this?

I have tried sed -n '/"/,/"/p' myfile but its not working.

Solution 1:

You can pipe stderr of your rsync command to a awk script:

awk -F '"' '{print $2}' 

Or to a cut command like this:

cut -d'"' -f2

Solution 2:

Using sed:

sed 's/^[^"]*"\([^"]*\)".*/\1/'

That looks for: beginning of line, a series of non-quotes, a double quote, captures a series of non-quotes, a double quote and anything else on the line, and replaces it by the captured material.

$ sed 's/^[^"]*"\([^"]*\)".*/\1/' <<'EOF'
> xyz... rsync: "/home/path/to/file": Permission denied (13) rsync:
> "/home/path/to/file1": Permission denied (13) rsync:
> "/home/path/to/file2": Permission denied (13) rsync:
> "/home/path/to/file3": Permission denied (13)
> EOF
/home/path/to/file
/home/path/to/file1
/home/path/to/file2
/home/path/to/file3
$

Test on RHEL 5 Linux with GNU sed, but only using features that would have worked in 7th Edition UNIX™ version of sed.

Incidentally, a slightly simpler way to do it is with two substitute commands; change everything up to and including the first double quote to an empty string (that's a sequence of zero or more non quotes followed by a double quote); change everything after what is now the first double quote to nothing:

sed 's/^[^"]*"//; s/".*//'

Incidentally, the command you tried (`sed -n '/"/,/"/p') prints from one line containing a double quote to the next line containing a double quote, without editing the lines at all. Which was why it didn't seem to work for you — it did what you asked, but what you asked it to do wasn't what you intended to ask it to do.

Efficiency-wise, there's unlikely to be a measurable difference in the performance. In terms of ease of maintenance, I suspect the latter is less taxing on the brain cells.