Shell Programming and Scripting

hi i have a file which is having

a.txt

name aaa
work business
emp since 2oct
office delhi

name aba
work business
emp since 6oct

name abc
work shopper
emp since 4oct
office kolkata


op
name : aaa emp since :2oct
name : aba emp since :6oct
name : abc emp since :4oct


i want o/p like above is it possible using awk or sed
pls help me

Use nawk or /usr/xpg4/bin/awk on Solaris:

Code:

awk -F'\n' '$0="name: "$1OFS$3' RS= infile

Just noticed the last colon:

Code:

awk -F'\n' '{sub(/since /,":");print"name: "$1OFS$3}' RS= infile

hi thanks 4 reply
but when i am running this it is giving op
name: name aaa emp : 2oct
name: work shopper

which is not as i desired (2nd line)
pls look it

Yep,
the code was wrong.
Is the below output correct?

Code:

$ cat file
name aaa
work business
emp since 2oct
office delhi

name aba
work business
emp since 6oct

name abc
work shopper
emp since 4oct
office kolkata

$ nawk -F'\n' '{sub(/ /," : ",$1);sub(/since/,"& :",$3);print $1,$3}' RS= file
name : aaa emp since : 2oct
name : aba emp since : 6oct
name : abc emp since : 4oct

thaks a lot
its working fine
can u pls explain the code

Yes.
Setting the RS to empty string means that records are separated by one or more blank lines. So after setting the FS to a new line we have:

Code:

$1 = name aaa
$2 = work business 
...

Then we just make the required substitutions (the colon after name and since) and print the desired fields.