Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi Everyone,

I need a little help in manipulating a file. This is what I need.

I need to move each line barring the top 3 lines, to the right by a 8 (or some specified number ) of places.

Example BEGIN:

Code:

Vertices 
Edges
Archs
1443   4042
862    4821
254    1177

I want to move the columns to the right by 8 places, that is,

Code:

Vertices
Edges
Archs
********1443    4042
********862    4821
********254    1177

Example END:

NOTE: HERE * represents an empty or white space.

I have about 30,000 such lines and so moving them to the right manually is not possible. I am wondering if there is a way to quickly do it using sed or something.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Try this(insert 5 space):

Code:

tail +4 file_name | sed 's/^/     /g'

Ignoring @spacebar. Without knowing what Operating System and version you are running or what Bourne-type Shell you use, we can do this in Shell. This will not work for "C Shell".

Code:

> outputfile
cat filename | while read line
do
      case "${line}" in
         "Vertices|Edges|Arches")
                    echo "${line}" >> outputfile
                    ;;
          *)
                    echo "        ${line}" >> outputfile # Eight spaces then the string
                    ;;
      esac
done

Please remember to post basic background information about your computer.

To the UUOC idiots. Yes I know that there is a cat in this script. We don't know what Shell this is.


Ps. Thank you for providing sizing information, 30,000 lines is nothing to a modern unix system on modern hardware. We don't need to be efficient.

Yes there is:

Code:

sed '4,$s/^/        /' infile > outfile