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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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XmTabList(library call) 												   XmTabList(library call)

NAME
XmTabList -- Data type for a tab list SYNOPSIS
#include <Xm/Xm.h> XmTabList DESCRIPTION
XmTabList is the data type for a tab list. A tab list consists of tab stop list entries (XmTabs). Whenever a tab component is encountered while an XmString is being rendered, the origin of the next X draw depends on the next XmTab. If a tab stop would cause text to overlap, the x position for the segment is reset to follow immediately after the end of the previous segment. Tab lists are specified in resource files with the following syntax: resource_spec: tab WHITESPACE [, WHITESPACE tab ]* The resource value string consists of one or more tabs separated by commas. Each tab identifies the value of the tab, the unit type, and whether the offset is relative or absolute. For example: tab := float [ WHITESPACE units ] float := [ sign ] [[ DIGIT]*. ]DIGIT+ sign := + where the presence or absence of sign indicates, respectively, a relative offset or an absolute offset. Note that negative tab values are not allowed. units indicates the unitType to use as described in the XmConvertUnits reference page. For example, the following specifies a tab list consisting of a one inch absolute tab followed by a one inch relative tab: *tabList: 1in, +1in For resources of type, dimension, or position, you can specify units as described in the XmNunitType resource of the XmGadget, XmManager, or XmPrimitive reference page. RELATED
Refer to the Motif Programmer's Guide for more information about tabs and tab lists. XmTabListCopy(3), XmTabListFree(3), XmTabListGet- Tab(3), XmTabListInsertTabs(3), XmTabListRemoveTabs(3), XmTabListReplacePositions(3), and XmTabListTabCount(3). XmTabList(library call)
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