Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi, I have an ascii file and i'm just wondering is it possible to edit the file using gawk. I just want to do something simple like print the second field $2, however I don't seem to be able to work out what field seperator to use.

I've tried some code I found in a google search that looks like:

Code:

 
gawk 'BEGIN{FS=sprintf("%c",0x7F)} {print $2}' OFS="," geo_met_checks_stope.asc

However I'm not sure what the 0x7F stands for in ascii. When I open up the ascii file using an editor like notepad or wordpad the fields look like they are seperated by a tab or spaces. However using code like:

Code:

 
gawk -F"[\t ]" '{print $2}' OFS="," geo_met_checks_stope.asc

doesn't work. Any ideas?

any problem by this ?

Code:

awk '{print $2}' geo_met_checks_stope.txt

Thanks rdcwayx, that works great

Can you tell me why this code works

Code:

 
awk '{print $2","$3}' OFS="," geo_met_checks_stope.asc >> junk.csv

Yet when I want to do a print $0 all the fields are jumbled together into one column.

Code:

 
awk '{print $0}' OFS="," geo_met_checks_stope.asc >> junk.csv

What i'm really looking for is how to quickly make a .csv file from an ascii using a shell script rather than manually doing it in excel using the "text to columns" menu option.

If you need export a CSV style file, you are correct to set OFS, but use it in wrong way. Try this:

Code:

awk '{print $2 OFS $3}' OFS="," geo_met_checks_stope.asc >> junk.csv

But if you export $0 directly, you need add $1=$1 before the code.

try this:

Code:

awk '$1=$1' OFS=, infile

Thanks again rdcwayx, much appreciated