Remove the first part of a string using sed

You're parsing some text to extract the username from a domain\username string, most likely from Windows. Most of the above answers are only addressing your specific example string.

The best way to do this is using regex in sed to extract whatever comes after \. Here's how you would do it:

sed 's|.*\\\(.*\)|\1|'

That will match everything (.*) until a backslash (here, we're escaping it, so it's \\), then match everything after the backslash (.*), but making it a capture group (i.e. wrap brackets around it, but we also have to escape them, so \(.*\)). Now that we have whatever comes after the \ in the string as a capture group, we print it by referencing it with \1.

You can use the above sed command with any domain name, not necessarily randomcollege-nt.

$ echo "randomcollege-nt\user90" | sed 's|.*\\\(.*\)|\1|'
user90

$ echo "domain\username" | sed 's|.*\\\(.*\)|\1|'
username

$ echo "anydomainname\roboman1723" | sed 's|.*\\\(.*\)|\1|'
roboman1723

I'd use a simple grep to look for user90:

$ echo "randomcollege-nt\user90" | grep -o user90
user90

If user90 is not constant, prefer this command:

$ echo "randomcollege-nt\user90" | grep -oP '(?<=randomcollege-nt\\)\w+'
user90

Finally using sed to edit the file in place:

$ sed -ri 's/randomcollege-nt\\(user[0-9]+)/\1/' my_file

Or to match all possible user accounts:

$ sed -ri 's/randomcollege-nt\\(\w+)/\1/' my_file

I know you want to use sed, but I'd use something different...

echo "randomcollege-nt\user90" | cut -d'\' -f2

Another sed:

$ echo "randomcollege-nt\user90" | LC_ALL=C sed -e 's/.*\\//'
user90

or POSIXly:

$ a='randomcollege-nt\user90'
$ printf '%s\n' "${a##*\\}"
user90