Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi guys,

I want to know how i can search null value and character value in a feed file.
my file has Pipe delimted records.
for eg:

Code:

1|12|xxx|yyy
.
.
.
N records

I know the the which column null and char occurs does it has for eg 3rd column which i can obtain by awk $3 and

Hi Rohit,
Your message ends in the middle of a sentence and is slightly garbled English.
If you are looking for an actual nul byte (byte with all bits set to 0) in a file, most of the text processing utilities on UNIX and Linux systems won't help much. If you are looking for a field that doesn't contain any characters, that is easy. If you want to know if the 3rd field is empty, that is easy.

Please give us a better description of what you are trying to do and show us sample output as well as sample input. (And please use CODE tags.)

try:

Code:

awk '{n=c=0; for (i=1; i<=NF; i++) {if (!$i) n++; if ($i ~ /^[A-Za-z][A-Za-z]*$/) c++}} n && c' FS="|" infile

my file contains records with pipe delimited where in i need to find the nth column for eg 3rd column which either contains null or character string value and print the entire row in another file.

for eg:

Code:

file:
xx|y|3|zzz|n
yy|zz|hello|n
zzz|nnnn||x
.
.

output file:
yy|zz|hello|n
zzz|nnnn||x

Code:

awk -F"|" -v COL=3 '$COL == ""' inputfile > outputfile

Hi,

the above would work for null and wat about for character field

The "3" in the 3rd field in your first input line is a character string (just like "hello" is a character string in your second input line).