Shell Programming and Scripting

NO! What you have shown us is a text file not a binary Microsoft Excel spreadsheet file. An underscore and a space are very different characters. If you are saying that you have converted a space to an underscore to indicate which one of the nine spaces between 1994 and alia is to be deleted; I say it doesn't matter whether you delete the 2nd of those nine spaces (which the sed script I provided does) or the 9th of those nine spaces. Either way, you get the output you requested (as long as the input you showed us above is an accurate representation of the text file you have as an input file). Did you try the sed command I suggested, or have you determined by looking at it that it won't do what you want?

Please try it before deciding it won't work. The sed script I suggested produces exactly the output you said you want when I run it!

I tried your code it doesn't work for me..
and i have a excel file with .xls extension. I am doing all the data processing in text file and finally transferring it to the xls file.

the xls file has that space.

Underscore is used to show the space its not the actual underscore.. I have used it to show the space,the leading space.

Again (see post#9): How would you propose to distinguish that space from the one(s) before? Are those spaces or <TAB>s?

If it is a REAL .xls file (which is hard to believe reading all the posts), we cannot work on it with text tools. You need to run EXCEL and remove that column's leading spaces (or maybe the perl excel module?).

You are correct i was talking about the one leading space inside the xls file.

---------- Post updated at 07:33 AM ---------- Previous update was at 07:18 AM ----------

my actual code is below:

Code:

#!/bin/ksh


tempsql=$EXPRS_ROOT/logs/temp1.txt
tempsql1=$EXPRS_ROOT/logs/temp2.txt
outputFile=$EXPRS_ROOT/logs/temp3.xls
outputFileName="RT Claim Dashboard Usage Report Cumulative.xls"

grep DATA $tempsql >> $tempsql1

sed 's/DATA//' $tempsql1 >> $outputFile

uuencode $outputFile "$outputFileName"  | mail -s "Report Cumulative" "alia@gmail.com"

exit 0

Just calling a file "something.xls" does not make it a (binary) EXCEL file. What you provided above is producing text files, and in those you can't distinguish one space from the other, and removing the first of nine is as good as removing the last (as Don Cragun said). If his proposal doesn't fit your needs, I'm afraid you're out of luck.

thanks..
But it do send me a mail with a proper xls file with four columns.

I suggest you to save the file in .csv format first. And all the rest I think you can figure it out