Shell Programming and Scripting

Hello,

First please excuse me for my poor english, i am french. Thank you for reading this thread and potentially helping me.

I have a 300ko file of one line (without any \n)
I want to create a new flat file with \n every 592 characters

I tried with some sed commands, but i am not very skilled...
I first found out that in a regexp you can't use the {number} pattern with a number larger than 255, so i tried this

Code:

cat myfile.src | sed -e 's/.\{255\}.\{255\}.\{82\}/&\n/g' > myfile.tgt

but i only get a empty file...
If you see what's wrong, or if you have another idea... maybe a awk ? or another command i don't know...
Thank you

use fold command

Code:

 
bash-3.00$ echo "123456789" | fold -w 3
123
456
789

In your case, it is

Code:

fold -w 592 myfile.tgt  > /tmp/newfile.tgt

---------- Post updated at 02:30 PM ---------- Previous update was at 02:19 PM ----------

nawk :

Code:

 
nawk '{for(i=1;i<length;i=i+592){ print substr($0,i,592)} }' input.txt > ouput.txt

while loop

Code:

while read -n592 line ; do echo $line; done < input.xt > output.txt

Just a small change to your command will do the job..By the way there is no need to use cat. Give the input file to sed as below..

Code:

sed -e 's/\(.\{255\}.\{255\}.\{82\}\)/&\n/g' myfile.src > myfile.tgt

wow! i don't expected such quick and accurate answers, this unix.com is a great place

@itkamaraj : the command fold is exactly what i need, thank you very much ! it works very well

@michaelrozar17 i found the syntax with cat in the man sed, but indeed your syntax is simpler. i tried your suggestion with the \( ... \) but it does the same thing, i get an empty file. But i will use the "fold" command, so there is no real need to go further in this way.

Thank you very much for your replies !

Wot sed version you are using..? It works fine for me with GNU Sed.

I'm working on a server with AIX 5.3
Maybe it explains why the sed command doesn't work here...!

I just got fold -c592 <bigfile >bigfile2 to work but I can't test it on AIX.