Hi all.
I'm trying to teach myself how to use awk from various on-line sources in order to accomplish a specific task. However, I am scratching my head over this:

the fields in each record are seperated by commas
one field is the date, which is currently like 10/4/2001
I would like it padded with zeros without the slashes, like 10042001

Is there a way to specify a field seperator within a field? that is to say, break down the field into sub-fields? Or am I barking up the completely wrong tree?

thanks,
kristy

Try the split() function...

The split() function has the syntax:
split(<string>,<array>,[<field separator>])

This function takes a string with n fields and stores the fields into array[1], array[2], ... , array[n]. If the optional field separator is not specified, the value of FS (normally space and tab) is used. For example, suppose we have a field of the form:


AWK just takes a bit of getting used to but once you do,
there is little you can't do with it

A great online reference:
http://vectorsite.tripod.com/tsawk0.html

I keep forgetting... the angle brackets get eaten

The split() function has the syntax:
split(string, array, [field separator])

Note the field separator is optional (in [] brackets).