Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,
I have tried to develop a sed script that inserts date and time in the third field in the first and second row below. The third row is an example and it shows where the date and time should be inserted. The script should check if the row already has date and time in the third field and if it is missing it should insert date and time.

1 106 texttexttext texttextexttext
4 1023 texttext texttext texttext

9 1234 07-02-05 16:06:46:743 texttext textextext text

Here is the script I have managed to develop so far. The script just insert date and time in the beginning of a line that miss the date and time and it will not be inserted in the third field. I would apreciate help to get date and time inserted correctly.

sed '/[0-9][0-9]*[0-9]* [0-9][0-9]*[0-9]*[0-9]* [0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9] [0-9][0-9]:[0-9][0-9]:[0-9][0-9]:[0-9][0-9][0-9]/!s/^/07-02-05 16:06:46:743: &/g'


/ Richard

A few assumptions here:

1 ) The field separator is always a single space
2 ) Field one is left justified to the start of the line

That being said, just modify your sed command to position the date correctly removing the trailing ampersand:

sed '/[0-9][0-9]*[0-9]* [0-9][0-9]*[0-9]*[0-9]* [0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9]
-[0-9][0-9] [0-9][0-9]:[0-9][0-9]:[0-9][0-9]:[0-9][0-9][0-9]/!s/^\([^ ]* [^ ]*\)
/\1 07-02-05 16:06:46:743 /g'

Given:
1 106 texttexttext texttextexttext
4 1023 texttext texttext texttext
9 1234 07-02-05 16:06:46:743 texttext textextext text

You get:
1 106 07-02-05 16:06:46:743 texttexttext texttextexttext
4 1023 07-02-05 16:06:46:743 texttext texttext texttext
9 1234 07-02-05 16:06:46:743 texttext textextext text

There is a lot of room for improvement to make the script more flexible, but this should get you going. Good luck!

The script works just fine.
Thanks
Richard