Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi!

I'm using SunOS 5.7 w/ Bash 2.01.

Currently, I'm working on a script that will make it possible to find textfiles which match certain criteria. While I write this message, I had some brainfarts, found the answer myself and the question I had in mind is now no longer the question I needed answered.

I now have another question, related to the first one, therefor I will leave the information below intact.

The output of the grepped 'ls'-output is written in a file (called 'test') like so that the file would contain:

Code:

-rw-r--r--   1 root     other        774 Jun  3 06:53 NRM1023079982241.txt
-rw-r--r--   1 root     other       2451 Jun  6 08:27 NRM1023344865054.txt
-rw-r--r--   1 root     other        516 Jun 13 09:34 NRM1023953690017.txt

How can I cut out everything from the beginning, up until 24 characters, so that it would look like:

Code:

   774 Jun  3 06:53 NRM1023079982241.txt
  2451 Jun  6 08:27 NRM1023344865054.txt
   516 Jun 13 09:34 NRM1023953690017.txt

I have tried to use awk for this, like so:

cat test | awk '{ print $5,$6,$7,$8,$9 }'

Code:

774 Jun 3 06:53 NRM1023079982241.txt
2451 Jun 6 08:27 NRM1023344865054.txt
516 Jun 13 09:34 NRM1023953690017.txt

Which produces (sort of) the desired output, but now the different columns are not aligned. Having them aligned is a requirement.

Next I thought of using cut, which is no problem, but *how* can I perform the cut-command on each line of the file? This was my original question, which I answered myself.

I now know that I can use this command:

cat test | awk '{ print $5,$6,$7,$8,$9 }' | cut -c1-24

Which works on all lines, but still doesn't produce the desired output, because (I just found out) the 'test'-file contains TAB's.

My new question is how to convert TAB's into spaces, so that I can cut out part of the file and still keep things aligned?

>> cat test | cut -c35-80

To answer the substitute question.....

sed 's/<tab goes in here>/<space goes in here>/g' file_name > new_filename
mv new_filename file_name

if this is dome from the command line - to enter the tab you will probably have to do this......
hold down ctrl
press v (while still holding down ctrl)
press i (while still holding down ctrl)

Doing it in vi - you might be able to just press tab...but the ctrl v i thing works there as well.

Thanks guys!