Shell Programming and Scripting

I know this is probably much simplier than I am making but I need some help please. I have a data file that contains a value on the first line between double quotes ("00043"). I need to assign the value between the first set quotes to a variable in my perl script for comparison analysis. Also, is there anyway to ignore the leading zero's?

For example

"0000006","NEW","1","05152003",.....

$varx = 0000006

Thanks in advance.

Try this:

Code:

yourPerlScript.pl `head -1 dataFile | awk -F"," '{print $1}' | awk -F"\"" '{print $2}'`

Now if that works, then the number should be passed as 0000006 (or 00043 or whatever) to the perl script. I'm not sure how exactly Perl accepts parameters, but I think it's just like a Unix script, so inside your Perl script you'd refer to the number using $1. (So print "$1"; inside your script should display 00043..)

Also, as far as ignoring leading zeroes, Perl should do that automatically depending on how you use the variable.. if you are comparing "0000006" stored in a variable to see if it's less than, say, the number 7, the program should correctly report "TRUE".

This doesn't seem to be picking up the value, perhaps I am not understanding something correctly. Here is what I have regarding your suggestion.

#!/usr/bin/perl


`head -1 /home/crecker/a.dat | awk -F"," '{print $1}' | awk -F"\"" '{print $2}'`;

print "value of var1 \n";
print $1;
print "end of var1 \n";
print "\n";
print "end of script";
print "\n";


The ouput is as follows:

value of var1
end of var1

end of script


It doesn't seem to be picking up $1.

My data set is

"0000006","NEW","1","05152003","USD","04232003","A","","GL","101","097","6106","1211","001","000","5 5","000","0000","200.00","0.00","Test Description 1","000001"
"0000006","NEW","1","05152003","USD","04232003","A","","GL","101","085","0054","1861","000","000","5 6","000","0000","0.00","500.00","Test Description 3","000001"


Thanks again.

Oh, you shouldn't put `head -1 /home/crecker/a.dat | awk -F"," '{print $1}' | awk -F"\"" '{print $2}'`; in the perl script..

You should run the line of code I posted from a unix prompt. Go to a prompt and run yourPerlScript `head -1 /home/crecker/a.dat | awk -F"," '{print $1}' | awk -F"\"" '{print $2}'`

Sorry about that, I can be pretty thick.

Thanks for your help.

If you are attempting to pull the first field from each line within Perl, then you should probably open the file, and grab the variable in the following way (see the man pages for the open, split, and close commands in Perl).

Code:

#!/usr/local/perl
#
$myfile = "./methos";
#
#
        open OLDSHAD, "<$myfile" or die "Can not open methos\n";
        while (<OLDSHAD>) {
                ($usertmp, $everythingelse) = split(/,/, $_, 2);
                system("/usr/bin/echo \"$usertmp\" ");
        }
                close OLDSHAD;

This is a crude example that may do what you want (scriptname.pl)

Code:

#!/usr/bin/perl 

while (<>) {
	if (m/^"([^"]*)",/) {
		$var = sprintf("%d", $1);
		# Replace by some processing here instead of print
		print $var, "\n";
	}
}

Say if your data are in the file "file.dat", type

cat file.dat | perl scriptname.pl

should extract the first field for you and assign to $var, eliminating the leading zeros. You may also want to use open/close to read the data file directly as RTM demonstrated.