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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 X11R4

expand

EXPAND(1)                                                          User Commands                                                         EXPAND(1)

NAME

       expand - convert tabs to spaces

SYNOPSIS

       expand [OPTION]... [FILE]...

DESCRIPTION

       Convert tabs in each FILE to spaces, writing to standard output.

       With no FILE, or when FILE is -, read standard input.

       Mandatory arguments to long options are mandatory for short options too.

       -i, --initial
              do not convert tabs after non blanks

       -t, --tabs=N
              have tabs N characters apart, not 8

       -t, --tabs=LIST
              use  comma  separated  list of tab positions The last specified position can be prefixed with '/' to specify a tab size to use after
              the last explicitly specified tab stop.  Also a prefix of '+' can be used to align remaining tab stops relative to the  last  speci-
              fied tab stop instead of the first column

       --help display this help and exit

       --version
              output version information and exit

AUTHOR

       Written by David MacKenzie.

REPORTING BUGS

       GNU coreutils online help: <http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/>
       Report expand translation bugs to <http://translationproject.org/team/>

COPYRIGHT

       Copyright (C) 2017 Free Software Foundation, Inc.  License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>.
       This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.  There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

SEE ALSO

       unexpand(1)

       Full documentation at: <http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/expand>
       or available locally via: info '(coreutils) expand invocation'

GNU coreutils 8.28                                                 January 2018                                                          EXPAND(1)
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