Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,

I am a bit stuck with displaying characters. I am having values like below in the proper displayable characters. which I would want to print the actual value on the right hand side. I dont want to create an array because I would have to create 255 different values. isnt there another way of just printing an octal equivalent or just the hex equivalent in the printf statements?

Values present
Values to be displayed:
Please can you suggest a way?

Can you explain how "2" turns out to be the octal or hex equivalent of "F2" ?

tyler_durden

Code:

for i in `cat <<inputfilename>> | awk '{ print "16#"$0}'`
do
 typeset -i10 i
 echo $i
done

or

Code:

echo "obase=10; F0" | bc

Thanks guys for your response. Well, I did not mention that the character set is EBCIDIC. so, the values I would have in the file would be like 81-89, 91-99, A2-A9 for the lower case a-z. similarly it would have F0-F9 for the number 0-9.

palsevlohit_123 - the code would simply convert the hexa-decimal value to decimal rather than converting it to the EBCIDIC value.

What unix Operating System are you running?

Assuming that this is a text file containing only characters data and was written on something like an IBM mainframe, the general solution is to use unix "dd" command with the "conv=ascii" parameter. Search for "conv=ascii" on this board.
In general this sort of conversion is best done at source because record structure and end-of-file can be lost during transmission.

Methyl - I am using AIX. well I was referring to the od -x output in a file. which I would want to convert to proper ascii values. dd will convert the ebcidic to ascii but I would want to convert the hex values to be converted to ascii.

Ah. Two steps then, hex -> binary, then EBDIC -> ASCII. The first step can be done like this:

Code:

$ echo -e "31\n32\n33\n34" | awk "{ printf \"%c\n\", strtonum(\"0x\" \$0); }"
1
2
3
4
$

This works fine for ASCII, for EBDIC you'd have to pipe it through dd conv=ascii afterwards as in:

Code:

$ echo -e "f0\nf1\nf2" | awk "{ printf \"%c\", strtonum(\"0x\" \$0); }" | dd conv=ascii 2> /dev/null ; echo
012
$