Hi,
I use awk but not as a programming language. Just generally in piplelines to split things out by fields.
I am trying to accomplish this one thing that I think a short awk routine would do great for, but can't figure it out.

Lets say I have a file that contains database columns. The file looks like this:
col1
col2
col3
..

I want awk to go through that file and turn each line into an array element so that I can do a printf statement that would contain all the lines in the file in one statement. The statement would look something like this:

printf("%s,%s,%s\n", array[0],array[1],array[2])

Actually, I guess the array elements would be variablized also.

Is this a simple thing i can get some help with ?

Thanks,
Floyd

That's pretty cool. thanks. It doesn't fully solve for me though.
I should have mentioned I have to add some to it, and add commas.
So I can use the tr command to go to newfile, then:
cat newfile|awk '{printf("mydata,moredata,%s,%s,%s\n",$1,$2,$3) }'

but, even that is not a full solution yet, because how will the script know how many fields are in the file, and be able to decide how many elements to put on the right side of the printf statement ?

For eg, if the file had 10 columns that the tr command turned into one line with 10 fields, how will I create a print statement that will know there were 10 fields so I can use them ?

Thanks,
floyd

Can you state the requirements in natural language?

Perhaps you want to transpose a column of unknown length to a row whose elements are separated by commas, and a fixed number of additional elements are to be added at the row start.

natural language ? Sorry I was doing my best to communicate my needs.

the script will parse a file that has an unknown number of lines. Each line contains a column name. For eg file1 looks like this:
firstname
lastname
email
...
I will have a hardcoded string or two. say, "token__a", and "audit_action__a"

My final output from parsing that file will look like this:
..... insert into $table ( token__a, audit_action__a, firstname,lastname,email ) ....

Thanks,
floyd

Ok Colemar, I just saw this latest change you did. It will work.
Thank you !

Obviously you were able to wade through my unatural language in order to determine what I was asking for. Good job :-)

Thanks again.

Floyd

Of course I didn't mean that your language was unnatural, just that you were partly using code to suggest how to solve the problem instead of explaining the problem in plain english.