Inverse of Cut Post: 302603371

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Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting Inverse of Cut Post 302603371 by landossa on Wednesday 29th of February 2012 10:14:51 PM

02-29-2012

Registered User

Inverse of Cut

Hi List,

I have a CSV file which I am manipulating. Each time I receive the CSV for processing, there will be extra columns of data.

Here's what I want to do; I want to be able to remove specific columns from the CSV data file, but keep the remaining columns, where the remaining columns are variable in how many columns there are. (there will be more columns each time the script is run on new data)

Lets say I want to remove columns 2,3,4,5,10 and keep the rest

Normally, in a fixed length CSV, which has the same amount of columns every time it is processed, say 20 columns each time, I would use the following command to achieve this: (thereby specifying columns I do want)

cut -d"," -f 1,6,7,8,9,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20

But since the amount of columns will increase each time I have to run this process, then I need a means of specifying columns that I don't want (inverse cut) rather than what I do want. Perhaps this could be achieved in sed or awk..

Has anyone got any ideas?

Any help much appreciated.

thanks,
land

landossa

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LEARN ABOUT FREEBSD

column

COLUMN(1)						    BSD General Commands Manual 						 COLUMN(1)

NAME

     column -- columnate lists

SYNOPSIS

     column [-tx] [-c columns] [-s sep] [file ...]

DESCRIPTION

     The column utility formats its input into multiple columns.  Rows are filled before columns.  Input is taken from file operands, or, by
     default, from the standard input.	Empty lines are ignored.

     The options are as follows:

     -c      Output is formatted for a display columns wide.

     -s      Specify a set of characters to be used to delimit columns for the -t option.

     -t      Determine the number of columns the input contains and create a table.  Columns are delimited with whitespace, by default, or with
	     the characters supplied using the -s option.  Useful for pretty-printing displays.

     -x      Fill columns before filling rows.

ENVIRONMENT

     The COLUMNS, LANG, LC_ALL and LC_CTYPE environment variables affect the execution of column as described in environ(7).

EXIT STATUS

     The column utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.

EXAMPLES

	   (printf "PERM LINKS OWNER GROUP SIZE MONTH DAY " ; 
	   printf "HH:MM/YEAR NAME
" ; 
	   ls -l | sed 1d) | column -t

SEE ALSO

     colrm(1), ls(1), paste(1), sort(1)

HISTORY

     The column command appeared in 4.3BSD-Reno.

BUGS

     Input lines are limited to LINE_MAX (2048) bytes in length.

BSD
								   July 29, 2004							       BSD