Good morning,

I am having a problem that I have never had before using awk. I have a txt file that obviously has clear columns and records. When I open the file in textedit, or any other program, it looks as it should, but when I check it in awk by printing the whole thing, it considers everything to be on one line. The file was generated on a mac using OS 9, and I am trying to do the scripting work on a system using OS X, Leopard. I would like to add, however, that I have done this EXACT analysis before and there were no problems reading the text file -- I did a preliminary analysis of the data mid-experiment. Now, the experiment is over, and the files are appended with all the more recent trials, so I recollected them using a flash drive and moved them to my main work station for analysis.

I have tried running DOS to Linux on the files, I have copied the text into new files and saved them, even copied into word, saved as .doc, and then exported to txt. I am baffled, and starting to think it is something awry in my awk build. Does anyone have insight into this issue?

PS, if I convert the txt files to rtf files, and then read them with awk, they look ok, except at the end of each line there is a " \ ". I thought I would just use awk to print everything except for the backslash into a new file, but then nothing can read that new file properly EXCEPT awk. I am pretty irritated. Thank you!