Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi there

Just wondered if someone could help me out

I have a file that has been delimited by tabs, ie

field1<tab>fiield2<tab>field3

Does anybody know a command that will convert tabs to commas throughout the entire file?

Note: there are a number of unpopulated fields in the file so after the conversion I would expect to see ,,,,,, in place of the <tab><tab><tab><tab><tab> as it is currently

any help on this would be greatly appreciated

Use tr to translate characters...

Code:

tr \\t , < file1 > file2

Thanks a lot for that , I have now got that working perfect !! I have one more question if i may (which i forgot to ask above) the file has 30 fields (and as such 30 commas) however, I dont need the last 15 fields for my program, so basically i want some way of removing these. I would like it to remove everything to the right the 15th comma (including that comma itself) I s this possible ?

thanks
Gary

Use cut to extract selected fields of each line of a file...

Code:

cut -d, -f-15 file2 > file3

thanks guys ive used the following and it works perfectly

tr '\t' ',' <input_file>output_file

cut -d, -f-12 input_file>output_file


thanks again

me again....thanks for all your help, now i know this is a bit of a dumb question (im a still quite new to this)

I now have the 3 commands i am going to use in my script, they will be

tr '\t' ',' <input_file>output_file
cut -d, -f-12 input_file>output_file
tail +2 input > output

My question is , Do i have to keep producing an output file after each command or is there a way using pipes that i can get all of these commands to be run on my file but with just the one command??

cat <input_file>|tr '\t' ',' |cut -d, -f-12 > <output_file>

I assume that the tail is used to check the file.