UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hmm I am also newbie to Unix... still learning it

I just tried below command on my test file

awk -F"|" 'BEGIN{RS="^M"}NR<=5{print}' learn.999

And it gave me output as:

Code:

6232|12341|8144836458|20110719132528|0
4124|5963|3022610000|20011023205510|0
7606|10858|3022560001 |20071012222359|0
7606|10257|3022560002|20061205202926|0
6664|7208|7247129469|20020927162412|0

I just displayed only for 5 records. You can try with 1000000 records.
Do not copy paste this command. Otherwise you will end up writing "^M" as literal characters instead of control characters. You need to do - Ctrl + V + M to get "^M". See if this helps...

I modified your script to 'BEGIN{RS="\015"} it did work. however, it did put each record on a separate line ! However, I want to be in one line like the original file is !

That's good.
in order to print them on one line, can you please try below:

awk -F"^M" '{for(i=1;i<=1000000;i++) printf("%s", $i)}' learn.999

I have assumed here that your input file will always contain at least 1000000 records.

The ^M is nothing but carriage Return. In unix, it will be displayed as ^M.

You cannot run these commands on a zipped file.

If you want to avoid, ^M and insert a new line there use below command,

Code:

tr '\r' '\n' < inputfile > outputfile

You may need to have enough space to accommodate the new file too.

Code:

awk 'BEGIN { RS="\r";ORS="\n" } NR<=1000000 {print}' inputfile  > outputfile

(I am not good with awk. I just googled to build this command. )

This one did not work. It did not insert ^M at the end of each record ! All are in one record wrapped and no ^M between each one !!

---------- Post updated at 01:10 PM ---------- Previous update was at 12:59 PM ----------

However, this worked to convert the timmed file back to the original format:


awk 'BEGIN { RS="\n";ORS="\r" } NR<=1000000 {print}' inputfile > outputfile


Issue resolved.

Thank you all for your valuable information.