Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,

I need some help in knowing how I can append tabs at the end of each line...
The data looks something like this:
field1, field2, field3, field4
1 2
3 4 5

I have values in field1 and field 2 in the first row and I would like to append tab on field3 and field4 for the first row..and in the same way append tab on field4 for the second row.

Fields can vary in number...Next time the file comes, it might have 10 fields..Can we achieve this in NAWK? Pass field number as the parameter and append tabs to all the fields which doesn't have values..

Please advise...
Madhu

awk -v x=4 '{printf("%s",$0);if(NF < x) for(i=NF;i<x;i++) printf("%s","\t"); printf("%s","\n")}'

x=4 is the number of fields you want to have.

Code:

awk -v x=6 '{ for (;x > NF; x-- ){ sub ("$", "\t") } print }'

x is the same as in the post above.

Thank you Rajeev and Reborg....

I tried both of your suggestions....

Code:

#!/usr/bin/ksh

nawk -v x=4 '{ for (;x > NF; x-- ){ sub ("$", "\t") } print }' filename > filename2

The code is putting tabs only for the first row and not the rows in the rest of the file...

Please advise...

Just wanted to kindly ask if anyone has an idea...

Code:

nawk -v x=78 '{ for (;x > NF; x-- ){ sub ("$", "\t") } print }' NarenTest.dat > filename2

The above piece of code suggested before does work only for the top row in the file. There are a couple of hundred rows in this file.

Please advise...

I apologize....I figured it out! Thank you very much....

Code:

nawk -v y=78 '{ for (x=y;x > NF; x-- ){ sub ("$", "\t") } print }' NarenTest.dat > filename2

Sorry you are correct, I forget to reset x.