Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi, I'm totally new to awk, so thanks in advance for your help.

I want to make a csv file out of a text file I've exported from a database I want to do two things:
1. Change pipes ("|") to commas (",") to make a text file into CSV
2. Remove the second line of the file, which is useless junk.

Here's what I have so far to accomplish #1. I'm struggling on #2. Help?

Code:

function pull() {
cat $@ | awk '{gsub(/\|/,","); print;}' > $@.csv;
}

Many thanks

Hi,
maybe sed is a better reply to that something like

Code:

sed "s/|/,/g; 2d" $@ >$@.csv

You get a useless use of cat award

You don't need gsub to handle separators in awk. awk handles separators natively, via the FS and OFS variables. Just make sure you alter the line before printing it -- even something useless like $1=$1 will do -- and it'll change all the separators for you.

Also, pretty sure that redirection won't do what you want it to -- replace in every file. You can't read and write the same file at the same time with shell redirection. You also can't redirect to several output files at once with $@.

How about this:

Code:

awk -v FS="|" -v OFS="," '{ $1=$1 } NR != 2' < input > output

...which, to overwrite the original file, you'd do:

Code:

awk -v FS="|" -v OFS="," '{ $1=$1 } NR != 2' < input > /tmp/$$
cat /tmp/$$ > input.converted

Remove the '.converted' once you've tested the code and found it does what you want -- it really stinks to lose all your originals to a bad program.

If you wanted to convert many files:

Code:

function fixfiles
{
        for FILE in "$@"
        do
                awk -v FS="|" -v OFS="," '{ $1=$1 } NR != 2' <"$FILE" > /tmp/$$
                cat /tmp/$$ > "$FILE".converted
        done
}

Many thanks[/QUOTE]

Thank you, both. Very helpful. Glad you guys are on this board!