Shell Programming and Scripting

hey guys, need ur expert help. m a core banker got stuck in someting techie and cant find a solution

have manged to extract a file from oracle apps in a format that looks something like this...

REC- A b c d x


INV- A b
REC- A b c x
000

INV- a b

what is need to do is something like this

read line by line and delete all lines dat dont start wit REC- or INV-
pick up only the first 70 chars of INV-

Can you pleaaaaasseeee help.. I 'll be indebted.. thanks so much

Code:

awk '/REC/ {print}
     /INV/ {print substr($0,1,70) }
' "file"

u mean its this simple.. thank u so much...
just one query.. would this command automatically read each line and identify if the line starts with REC- or INV-

and secondly "file" is the filename right..

A little bit more secure:

Code:

awk '/^REC-/ {print}
     /^INV-/ {print substr($0,1,70) }
' "file"

yes. To learn more about this command, type man awk.
yes


@aigles:thanks

cat filename | sed '/XXX\|YYY/!d' | awk '
{
if ($0 ~ /YYY/)
print substr($0,1,70)
else
print
}'

please take a look here