Shell Programming and Scripting

Are these lines indeed 2101 characters long or do you have linefeed characters in between? This command only works with records that a in one line as suggested, so spurious linefeeds need to be removed. If on Solaris, use /usr/xpg4/bin/awk or nawk

Splitting each byte into a field by setting FS to nothing doesn't work on most of the awks except gawk and the newer version of the original awk (maintained by professor Kernighan). Even if when it worked, it is very inefficient. Much more portable and efficient with substr($0,435,1) although $435 looked more elegant.

Thanks binlib! I never realized this, although it works in mawk too. But POSIX says that behaviour is unspecified. So it becomes:

Code:

awk 'substr($0,435,1)~/[12]/{print>f;next}1' f=new infile > old

Thank you for letting us know that it worked in mawk also.
I remember when Neo asked for suggestions to improve this site, somebody mentioned an environment where we can access different OSes so that we can test our solutions on the systems that we don't have. I imagine with a name like unix.com, this site should be able to find sponsors to donate at least some kind of virtual machines.