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Full Discussion: Cutting the first 8 chars of a 2nd column
Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers Cutting the first 8 chars of a 2nd column Post 302178973 by era on Wednesday 26th of March 2008 05:20:58 PM
Old 03-26-2008
Except many versions of sed don't understand \t, and that's a pretty wacky thing to do anyway. If you really have trouble coping with tabs then put it in a variable and use that.

Code:
tab='	'  # make sure you get it right this one time (^:
sed -e "/\\(${tab}........\\).*/\\1/"

That's the whole program.

If you want to play around with a while loop then why not let read take care of the splitting. With IFS= you can tell it that the fields are tab separated.

Code:
while IFS='	' read first second  # that's a tab there between the quotes again
do
    echo "$first" | tr '\012' '\011'  # convert first newline to tab
    echo "$second" | cut -c1-8
done <my_file

If you have trouble typing a literal tab at the command line, try ctrl-v tab.
Last edited by era; 03-29-2008 at 07:51 PM.. Reason: Correct octal code for tab, duh
 

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LEARN ABOUT HPUX

xmtablistremovetabs

XmTabListRemoveTabs(library call)										 XmTabListRemoveTabs(library call)

NAME

       XmTabListRemoveTabs -- A convenience function that removes noncontiguous tabs

SYNOPSIS

       #include <Xm/Xm.h>
       XmTabList XmTabListRemoveTabs(
       XmTabList oldlist,
       Cardinal *position_list,
       Cardinal position_count);

DESCRIPTION

       XmTabListRemoveTabs removes noncontiguous tabs from a tab list.	The function creates a new tab list by copying the contents of oldlist and
       removing all tabs whose corresponding positions appear in the position_list array.  A warning message is displayed if a specified  position
       is invalid; for example, if the value is a number greater than the number of tabs in the tab list.

       tablist	 Specifies the tab list.  The function deallocates oldlist and the tabs it contains after extracting the required information.

       position_list
		 Specifies an array of the tab positions to be removed. The position of the first tab in the list is 0 (zero), the position of the
		 second tab is 1, and so on.

       position_count
		 Specifies the number of elements in the position_list.

RETURN

       If oldlist or position_list is NULL, or position_count is 0 (zero), returns oldlist. Otherwise, this function returns  the  new	tab  list.
       The function allocates space to hold the returned tab list.  The application is responsible for managing the allocated space.  The applica-
       tion can recover the allocated space by calling XmTabListFree.

RELATED

       XmTabList(3) and XmTabListFree(3).

														 XmTabListRemoveTabs(library call)
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