Shell Programming and Scripting

It is actually a <newline> instead of a <carriage-return> that UNIX and UNIX-like systems expect to find as line terminators.

To just add a <newline> character to the end of a file before using cut:

Code:

echo >> file; cut -d";" -f8- file

To add a <newline> character to the end of the input cut sees without modifying the file:

Code:

{ cat file; echo; } | cut -d";" -f8-

PS: Oops, the last command above only works with shells that use Bourne shell syntax; not csh.

The csh can do

Code:

( cat file; echo ) | cut -d";" -f8-

But this will produce an extra empty line if the input file is complete.
--
BTW the cut command in AIX 5.1 can handle an incomplete line.
Another method that might work in AIX 4.x:

Code:

read line < file
echo "$line" | cut -d";" -f8-

Faster but less flexible is

Code:

IFS=";" read x1 x2 x3 x4 x5 x6 x7 rest < file
echo "$rest"

hmm, now you got me interested in what exactly is the content of this file.

You got already various (and valuable) suggestions from my colleagues. My suggestion is, however, to spare us the guessworks and do the following: execute the shown command on the file and its output:

Code:

# cat /path/to/your/file | od -ax
<...output of the command here...>

The reason for this is that maybe some other "non-standard" traits of the file might include invisible characters and similar things that might confuse used commands. The output will make them visible (if they exist at all).

I hope this helps.

bakunin