Originally Posted by Franklin52

Please attach files in a flat format. Anyway, assuming the first instance of ";;;;" is on the first line:

Code:

awk 'NR==1{next}
!c || /;;;/{sub(";;;",""); c=sprintf("%04d",++i); close("comment" c ".txt")}
{print > "comment" c ".txt"}' monica.txt

Use nawk or /usr/xpg4/bin/awk on Solaris.

Originally Posted by Corona688

This "monica.txt" file isn't text, it's RTF! Hoping you knew that, but maybe you didn't. Substitution's still possible of course.

Boy, it's sure obnoxious having to work with BSD sed after having used GNU sed... Things any rational person would guess were basic, basic, basic features, like \n, don't work.

I did eventually manage to get it to do this:

Code:

$ echo "abc;;;def" | sed 's/;;;/\
/g'
abc
def
$

Yes, that is a literal newline inside the expression. You have to put a \ before the enter key to "escape" it or BSD sed will whine about it. It may be possible to substitute it in by putting the expression in double quotes, and using $'\n', but this may be more trouble than it's worth and involve outrageous numbers of backslashes.
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