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Full Discussion: Splitting a delimited text file
Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting Splitting a delimited text file Post 302899054 by lupin..the..3rd on Friday 25th of April 2014 04:58:46 PM
Old 04-25-2014
Splitting a delimited text file
Howdy folks, I've got a very large plain text file that I need to split into many smaller files. My script-fu is not powerful enough for this, so any assistance is much appreciated.

The file is a database dump from Cyrus IMAP server. It's basically a bunch of emails (thousands) all concatenated into one huge file. There is a delimiter line between each email. It looks something like this

Code:
--dump-4564564.some.jibberish.whatever
From: user@domain.com
To: myfriend@email.com

Email Body

Best Regards,
Email Author

--dump-789789863.random.numbers.maybe
From: anotheruser@domain.com
To: someguy@planet.earth

Email Body

Your Friend,
another user

So as you can see, the start of each email is preceded with a line that begins with "--dump".

What I'm looking for, is:

1. To split this monolithic file into many smaller files, where each smaller file contains a single email.
2. Where each smaller file should contain all of the lines of text after a "--dump" delimiter, up until the next "--dump" delimiter (or end of file).
3. And the "--dump" delimiter line itself should not be included in each smaller file.

I feel like some awk/grep/sed magic could do this, but I'm not enough of a wizard to write this script.

Thank you very much!
 

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LEARN ABOUT OSX

dump

dump(n) 																   dump(n)

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

NAME

       dump - Dump information about Tcl interpreter in TkCon

SYNOPSIS

       dump method ?-nocomplain? ?-filter pattern? ?--? pattern ?pattern ...?

_________________________________________________________________

DESCRIPTION

       The  dump  command  provides  a way for the user to spit out state information about the interpreter in a Tcl readable (and human readable)
       form.  It takes the general form:

       dump method ?-nocomplain? ?-filter pattern? ?--? pattern ?pattern ...?

       The patterns represent glob-style patterns (as in string match pattern $str).  -nocomplain will prevent dump from throwing an error  if	no
       items matched the pattern.  -filter is interpreted as appropriate for the method.  The various methods are:

       dump command args
	      Outputs one or more commands.

       dump procedure args
	      Outputs one or more procs in sourceable form.

       dump variable args
	      Outputs  the values of variables in sourceable form.  Recognizes nested arrays.  The -filter pattern is used as to filter array ele-
	      ment names and is interepreted as a glob pattern (defaults to {*}).  It is passed down for nested arrays.

       dump widget args
	      Outputs one or more widgets by giving their configuration options.  The -filter pattern is used as to filter the config options  and
	      is interpreted as a case insensitive regexp pattern (defaults to {.*}).

SEE ALSO

       idebug(n), observe(n), tkcon(1), tkcon(n), tkconrc(5)

KEYWORDS

       Tk, console, dump

COPYRIGHT

       Copyright (c) Jeffrey Hobbs <jeff at hobbs.org>

TkCon									2.5								   dump(n)
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