Shell Programming and Scripting

The tail command in RudiC's suggestion copies your source files to their destinations removing "$HDCNT" lines of headers during the copy.

Your code above will do two things:Do you really want to change your input files before you copy their contents to their destinations, or do you just need to remove the header lines from the copied files? If you don't need to modify the source files:

Code:

sed 1d "$file" > /output/aus/"$file"

will do what you want. If you need to change the source files too:

Code:

sed 1d "$file" > "$file.$$" && cp "$file.$$" "$file" && rm "$file.$$"

is a safe way to do what you want without breaking links to your source file (if any existed).

Hi don,

Before I copy I need to change the source files which ends with _01.txt I.e. To remove the header

Fine. And, since you copy the modified source file to the destination (not move it), when you run your script again a few seconds (or an hour, or day, or week, or month, or year) later, it will update that same file again (this time removing a line of data instead of the header). And then it will copy the updated file again to its destination discarding a line of data there as well. And, after you have run your script enough times, your source and destination files will both be empty.

This doesn't seem like a logical way to handle things to me, but you can do it that way if you want to.

Hi don,

Once i have copied i wil remove the files or i will move the files from filepath to temp path and remove the header from that temp path

Hi,

I'm quite new to scripting too.

just curious if the current code you are using is already working and you wanted to enhanced the code to omit the header in individual file_0X.txt?

may i also check if the header string in each individual *.txt is unique or different?

if its unique, maybe this might work?

Code:

for i in `cat property.txt | grep -v <HEADER>`
do
file=$(ls -t1 $filepath|  grep -i $file)

if [ "$i" == "aus" ]
then
if [ -f $file ]
then

      	cp $file /output/aus/
else 
	echo "No aus files"

fi

elif [ "$i" == "nz" ]
if [ -f $file ]
then

      	cp $file /output/nz/
else 
	echo "No nz files"

fi

fi
....
....
done

just a thought

Thanks
But yours wont work because there is no header like unique and in property file there is no header string like that i need to remove the header from source file before copying

Huh? You have to remove the header before you copy the source file and then you will copy the source file and then you will copy the source file (to a country directory) and then you will remove the source file OR you will remove the header before you copy the source file and then you will copy the source file (to a country directory) and then you will move the source file to a temporary file an thend you will remove the header from the temporary file again and then you will remove the temporary file. If either of these multistep processes are interrupted and you restart the process, zero of more lines of data will be lost.

Either of those sound like a lot of extra work when it sounds like you get the same results with MUCH less processing if you just copy the source file except for the header to a country directory and then remove the source file. If this processing is interrupted and restarted, no data will be lost.

Why is it that you want to make this so complicated? Why do you need to remove the header BEFORE copying the file? Why isn't removing the header WHILE you are copying the file sufficient?