Shell Programming and Scripting

You are missing the point. You want to rename the file - somefile.txt -> somefile.xls
That is all you need to do. Excel will do the rest when a user opens it.

Code:

oldname="somefile.txt"
newname=${oldname%%.txt}".xls"
mv $oldname $newname

Jim,

That's not a good idea, if you rename a .txt or .csv file to an .xls file, Excel doesn't use the field separators and places every line in one column.

Regards

Thanks Jim,

however all info is in one column?

Here is a sample data file.

Code:

> cat infile.txt
joe   100.00     orange     1
steve 12.50      blue       3
bob   19.99      green      9
tony  87.13      white      2

I can then turn it into a csv file. Excel can naturally read a csv file. There will be no data formatting, but the data will be placed across the rows and columns - in this case, four columns of 4 rows of data. Below is the awk command to parse and create the csv file.

Code:

> cat make_csv
#! /usr/bin/bash

awk 'OFS="," {print $1,$2,$3,$4}' <infile.txt >outfile.csv

cp outfile.csv outfile.xls

The following csv will be opened by Excel nicely - putting into four columns and four rows. The user can keep in csv format, or save into xls format.

Code:

> cat outfile.csv
joe,100.00,orange,1
steve,12.50,blue,3
bob,19.99,green,9
tony,87.13,white,2

If the file is renamed to an xls fil extension, Excel will load the data, but will put it into only one column of four rows.

Code:

> cat outfile.xls
joe,100.00,orange,1
steve,12.50,blue,3
bob,19.99,green,9
tony,87.13,white,2

thanks to everyone for all there help on this.