Shell Programming and Scripting

Hey, I'm desperately in need of a solution to a seemingly easy problem. How can I match a specific number of spaces and replace them. As in, I have a file that instead of being broken into parts by new lines is broken into parts via 500+ spaces. How can I replace any grouping of more than 400 spaces or so with a newline? Sed? Tr? Sorry for the retarded question in advance. Thanks a lot.
-Dick

If i understand your issue properly you will need to the the last or both of the following :

$prompt 1> sed -r 's/ +/ /g' <filename>
$prompt 2> sed -r 's/ +/\n/g' <filename>

Hope this helps !

FMA

I'm not sure if you understood me entirely. I assume you meant -e instead of -r in your commands? Because my shell doesn't recognize a -r argument for sed. When I used -e it simply cleared my whole file, which I did not understand.

What I have is a file that has no new lines in it. Instead, between entries of data are about 500 spaces or more. What I would like to do is have something that goes through the file and replaces instances of 500 or more spaces together with a new line character, but only when it is large amount of spaces, because the data entries have spaces in them as well.

If anyone can help it would be most appreciated.
-Dick

Can you be specific on number 500 or 400 ? or is there bare minimum?

There isn't a specific minimum, just something that would be abnormal to have in the middle of text. You can assume that you can put a new line in for any place that has more than 10 spaces. That help?

Try:

Code:

awk '{gsub(/  {500,}/,"\n"); print}' yourfile

Your input file maybe long for awk , in that case use:

Code:

sed 's: \{500,\}:\^J:g' yourfile

Note that you can't use ^J literally.
Type \ and press return to get it.

Bye