Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi Chubler,

As said.. my sed does not have -E option.
Is there any other way of acheiving the same... May be multiple steps, is also fine..

Thanks in Advance..
Gopi

Well, this sort of thing can be done with awk script but it's probably going to be a little more maintainable if you stick with sed.

The -E option was really just to allow us to say .{150} without -E we are stuck putting 150 dot characters is it's place.

You could do this quite easily in vi with 150i.<ESC>, but this is pretty bad form and I recon it's worth the overhead to build an environment var with this string of 150 dots in it, let's call it D150:

Code:

D150=$(print "%150s" "" | tr " " ".")
sed 's/^\('$D150'.*\)    \([^ ]\)/\18251\2/' infile

The above script will work in most shells (except probably csh). If your doing a few of these sorts of things in the 1 script you could even write a function to fill n dots:

Code:

function filldot {
    printf "%$1s" "" | tr " " "." 
}
sed 's/^\('$(filldot 150)'.*\)    \([^ ]\)/\18251\2/' infile

Hi,

I tried the code snippet... it gives me diffrent output...
I just had a file with two rows, and uploaded the result....

Actually i'm trying the code for position before 23... but it changes in '475' position... so i did not try for replacing in other positions....

Hope the screenshot helps you to identify the problem..

Thanks,
Gopi

Yes I see the issue, the .* part is matching too much, try this:

Code:

sed 's/^\('$D150'[^ ]* *\)    \([^ ]\)/\1!!!!\2/' infile

Hi,

Now a little different behavior... Please see the attached screenshot....
Hope it helps you....

Thanks in Advance
Gopi

This is what the code is supposed to do: from possition 117 search forwards to find next non-space with 4 or more spaces in front of it, and replace the last 4 spaces with 8251.

replaced as below

Code:

000000(other-non-spaces)         999
000000(other-non-spaces)     8251999

I assume you wanted to replace 00000000000.00 with 00000008251.00 in which case you would need something like this:

Code:

sed 's/^\('$D150'[^0]*0*\)0000\.00/\18251.00/' infile

Thanks a lot... For your time.... Made it work...

Gopi