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Full Discussion: Breaking long lines into (characters, newline, space) groups
Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting Breaking long lines into (characters, newline, space) groups Post 302316390 by rowie718 on Friday 15th of May 2009 12:31:52 AM
Old 05-15-2009
Thank you so much for your help cfajohnson!

I put together your suggestions and tested them. Its almost there, but there were 2 problems. The first I fixed fairly easily. The 79th character is the newline in the orignal ldif, so I shouldve expressed it as wanting 78 characters. I deducted 1 from anywhere I saw 79 or 80 in your awk command and that seemed to do the trick. The second problem is trickier. Take a 240 character line as an example. When the awk command breaks it, and adds the space in the second chunk, it does not take into account that the last character of that second chunk should be at the same ending position as the first chunk. As it is currently written, all chunks after the first break align 1 character to the right because of the space.

Example:
Code:
123456789012345678901234567890.....(240 character long string repeating)

currently breaks into :
123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678
 901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456
 789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234
 567890

but should actually end up more like this, so that every line has 78 characters, 
plus newline (including the space we've added):

123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678
 90123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345
 67890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012
 34567890

The script currently looks like this:

#!/bin/ksh

echo "where is the ldif file located that you would like to parse?"
read ldiffile

awk 'length > 78 { while ( length($0) > 78 ) {
    printf "%s\n ", substr($0,1,78)
    $0 = substr($0,79)
  }
  if (length) print
  next
}
{print}' $ldiffile > /out.txt

Thanks again for your help, I really appreciate it.
 

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LEARN ABOUT SUSE

ldbadd

LDBADD(1)							   User Commands							 LDBADD(1)

NAME

       ldbadd - Command-line utility for adding records to an LDB

SYNOPSIS

       ldbadd [-h] [-H LDB-URL] [ldif-file1] [ldif-file2] [...]

DESCRIPTION

       ldbadd adds records to an ldb(7) database. It reads the ldif(5) files specified on the command line and adds the records from these files
       to the LDB database, which is specified by the -H option or the LDB_URL environment variable.

       If - is specified as a ldb file, the ldif input is read from standard input.

OPTIONS

       -h
	   Show list of available options.

       -H <ldb-url>
	   LDB URL to connect to. See ldb(7) for details.

ENVIRONMENT

       LDB_URL
	   LDB URL to connect to (can be overrided by using the -H command-line option.)

VERSION

       This man page is correct for version 4.0 of the Samba suite.

SEE ALSO

       ldb(7), ldbmodify, ldbdel, ldif(5)

AUTHOR

       ldb was written by Andrew Tridgell.

       If you wish to report a problem or make a suggestion then please see the : http://ldb.samba.org/ web site for current contact and
       maintainer information.

       This manpage was written by Jelmer Vernooij.

Samba 3.5							    06/18/2010								 LDBADD(1)
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