Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,

I have a file as follows:

4047241;20050201;999;12345
5642154;20050202;123;56456

What I need to do is to take each of the fields (delimited by ";") and return the following

4047241<tab> 20050201<tab> 999<tab> 12345
5642154<tab> 20050202<tab> 123<tab> 56456
i.e. each of the fields needs to be examined and if it is under 10 charachters in length I then need it to replace the field with the original charachters plus enough spaces to make it ten characters and replace the ";" with tabs. This output should be sent to a new file

any help appreciated

nawk -f pen.awk input.txt

here's pen.awk:

Code:

BEGIN {
  FS=";"
  OFS=sprintf("\t")
}
{
   for(i=1; i <= NF; i++)
     $i=sprintf("%-10s", $i)
   print
}

Hello ..

can u please explain the usage :

thanks in advance

esham

This is your garden variety "for loop" that uses the built-in variable NF in the condition statement to control interation. NF is set internally by Awk to the number of fields in the record. Awk works on each line in the file (called a record), and on each field within a record. Records are separated based upon the value specified by the FS (field separator) variable (another built in variable - this set by the user) and they are not necessarily limited to one line per file.That code says, for each field (delimited by a semi-colon) within a record, format the field with spaces (up to 10) if the field is less than size 10. Then print the field. Note that the variable OFS (Output Field Separator) is set to "\t" which is a tab. So every time a value in the record is printed, it will be separated by a tab.

More information than you ever wanted to know about Awk, can be found here