Shell Programming and Scripting

Here is the code .....

isn't this what you wanted.....

thanks. I have my fields surrounded by " (quotes) like I need, Now my problem is the fields are seperated by 'tabs' how do I change it to be seperated by 'space' ???
Not sure how to specify a 'space' or a 'tab'

borrowing from futurelet....

Code:

awk 'BEGIN { FS = "\t" ; q="\"";  OFS = q " " q }
{ $1 = $1; print q $0 q }'  oldfile >newfile

with space....

This will take care of your situation not matter how many fields you have on a line.

sed -e 's/^/\"/g' -e 's/\tab/\"\tab\"/g' -e 's/$/\"/g' < input_file

Do not try and copy and paste the command. Substitute the tab with acutal tabs.

The way it works:

Before reading any lines from the file, change the field-separator, set the variable q to a double quote, and change the ouput field-separator:

Code:

BEGIN { FS = "\t" ; q="\"";  OFS = q " " q }

This is executed for each line of the file:

Code:

{ $1 = $1; print q $0 q }

$0 is the line just read; $1 is the first field. When you change one of the fields (or pretend to change it by saying "$1 = $1"), awk rebuilds $0 from the individual fields by placing OFS between each pair of fields. So, if $0 is

Code:

foo bar

, after executing $1 = $1, $0 is

Code:

foo" "bar

.
The last step is to print $0 with a quote before and after it.

Thanks to everyone.
I appreciate it.