Shell Programming and Scripting

Per, need some more help. Noting your quote above, we have a field that is signed (see below) that I need to put into comp-3 format. Any ideas? I know you said the decimal is implied, but what about handling a positive or negative number?

+000000000050408

or

-000086214050408

Take another look. The script handles negative numbers.

Oops, sorry about that. Was so concerned about the packing piece of the puzzle that I overlooked the negative handling. One thing in your script has me confused. I did a man on "od" and there is no "-t" option. What is this line doing:

print -n ${output[o]} | od -t x1

Also, in your script, is it the "$result" variable that is ultimately holding the packed output? With all of the outputting in different formats and display messages (and my "light" UNIX coding experience), I got a little disoriented.

Here is the AIX man page for od. I see the -t option which is required for posix compatability.

Look at the end of my script:

Code:

#
#  output the packed decimal to prove it worked

olength=${#output[*]}
o=0
while ((o <= olength)) ; do
        print -n ${output[o]} | od -t x1
        ((o=o+1))
done

The output is in "output".

I have tried using the sample script, but have a problem when trying to pack a number that has concurrent zeroes. The result of packing to two zeroes results in a null hex value, that cannot be printed. Is there any way to deal with this?

Thanks for the info.

I found this thread showing how to make a Comp-3 field. However, I have to accomplish the opposite:
Read a count variable stored as Comp-3 telling me how many records to expect. Then, report back if I received all of the records in an ftp.

So, any ideas or past scripts, on how to convert a signed Comp-3 field?

Thanks.

The main problem is that comp-3 is just binary data. Thoughout the thread I am doing stuff like "print -n ${output[o]} | od -t x1" because the data is binary. This is why coutulea's question made no sense. So where is your data? How do you propose to make it available to a shell script? If you can isolate the comp-3 field and pump it through od and read the out of od into a script, it probably can be done.