Output formatting problem..Plz hlp - Linux

anushree.a · #1 06-23-2008

Hi guys,
It will be a great help if somebody can help me in following problem.
I have tried hard but because of lack of UNIX/LINUX knowledge I am not able to do it.
I have written a script that returns 3 things of all the employees in my organisation. i.e. Name, Login time & log out time of each and every employee. It returns the output in pipe-delimited format. For your ref. sending a small sample

e.g.
Deepti|083032|174501
Anushka|081705|190003
Neeraj|082715|173200

After getting this output I copy it to excel and convert that pipe-delimited txt to normal excel format by using “Text-to-columns” option in excel.
Then I use MS Word’s “Mail Merge” function to arrange n print it in a particular format. For your ref. sending a small sample

e.g. (After using MS word’s “Mail Merge” option, the document which is ready to print looks something like this)

Name: Deepti

Login time: 083032

Log out time: 174501

Name: Anushka

Login time: 081705

Log out time: 190003

Name: Neeraj

Login time: 082715

Log out time: 173200

This format then I print on a “PIN Mailer” (Continuous stationary)
Now, what my problem is, as you can see, I have to do lot of manual work in this log printing process.
Can I in any way automate it? Like, something which I can incorporate in my script which is giving me that pipe-delimited format.
Can I get a txt document that can be ready to print?

Waiting for reply.
And thanx in advance

joeyg · #2 06-23-2008

Before approaching from unix, Excel will read csv (comma separated values) files without having to do much of anything. I write to csv [use a , instead of | as delimiter] whenever I need to create something for my users that they will want to open in Excel.

What I am thinking is:
(a) create your "|" delimited file [coding already in-place]
(b) follow-up script to read that file and create a .txt output file

The follow-up would be roughly:

Code:

rm printfile.txt
while read zf
   do
   fld1=$(echo "$zf" | cut -d"|" -f1)
   fld2=$(echo "$zf" | cut -d"|" -f2)
   fld3=$(echo "$zf" | cut -d"|" -f3"
   echo "Name: "$fld1 >>printfile.txt
   echo " " >>printfile.txt
   echo ...
     {rest of echo lines per record}
done

Franklin52 · #3 06-23-2008

Try something like this:

Code:

your_script | awk -F "|" '{printf("Name: %s\n\nLogin time: %s\n\nLog out time: %s\n\n\n\n", $1, $2, $3)}'

Regards

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