In this case it is even a lot easier to do it. One will not have to rely on these complicated heuristics era had to resort to in absence of delimiters (great job, btw., era) but could use simply "cut" to split every line into fields, then use "printf" to output the fields in a formatted way.

Suppose your delimiter will be "|" (the pipe symbol) then your file would look like (just header and one line):

Code:

Item|Desc|Qty|Ord|Ext|Price|Required|Date|Disposition
PRT|KE54900 MAGNETIC BASE PROTRACTOR MI|1.00|EA|194.85||||

The reformatting is quite easily done now by the "cut"-utility: cut reads a line of text (aka "records") and splits it up into "fields" using a separator character. I show the logic in ksh here because this is easier to understand, the same functionality could be done in awk but the resulting code would be less intuitive.

Code:

cat /path/to/inputfile | while read line ; do
     item="$(print - $line | cut -d'|' -f1)"
     desc="$(print - $line | cut -d'|' -f2)"
     qty="$(print - $line | cut -d'|' -f3)"
     ord="$(print - $line | cut -d'|' -f4)"
     ....etc.....
     
     # output fields in a formatted way:
     printf  "%5s" "$item" >> /path/to/outputfile
     printf  " %20s" "$desc" >> /path/to/outputfile
     printf  " %4s" "$qty" >> /path/to/outputfile
     printf  " %5s" "$ord" >> /path/to/outputfile
     ....etc....
     printf  "\n" >> /path/to/outputfile
done

Not at all difficult: suppose you have already extracted the adressing part and put it in variables:

Code:

cat /path/to/outputfile | mail -s "$subject" "$mailaddress"

How exactly the address and subject is to be extracted is depending on the form of the input file. Just give us an example and i am sure someone or other can work that one out.

This poses no problem. If there is a certain condition (for instance a file is produced by your software, etc.) to watch for the script i sketched out could run in a loop looking every x seconds for the condition to become true and than act accordingly, otherwise wait for another x seconds. 40 mails an hour should pose no problems even for the smallest p505 there is. The execution for such a script will typically take a fraction of a second.

I hope this helps.

bakunin