Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,

I'm quite new to unix script, and is having some problems currently.
Say for the following sample project:

The sql result is stored in a file >sql.txt.
The result is shown (sample table):

Code:

ID      Price    Tag    Name
----- ------- -----  --------
A      100      test1  test1
B      200      test2  test2

....and so on

1. Go through every line of the sql result, starting from ID A all the way to the end (row 3 onwards)
2. The result is separated by variable space , ie, width ="5, 4, 5, 7".
3. check value of the Price, Tag of each row, and do processing with it.

I've no gawk, so I cannot use the FIELDWIDTH to set it.
How can I do it with awk/nawk or any other methods?

thanks! appreciate any help and tips

awk refers $1 to the 1st field, $2 to the 2nd field etc. even with multiple spaces, so what is the point?

Regards

Hi,

As in how can I separate the row data into its respective field using the column spacing. There is no clear separator like | or ,. Thus, I cannot use commands like FS="|" to clearly get the column values.

thanks

As I mentioned before, the fields are referred to $1, $2, $3 and $4, in your scenario:

Code:

awk '{print $1, $2, $3, $4}' file

should print the fields of your file, there's no need to use another fieldseparator.
If you want a formatted output you can use the printf command in awk.

Regards

Hi ,

the table i've given above is just a sample..sorry if i'm not clear
As some columns are text field, it is possible that it will contain " " or "," etc, and will not be separated properly.

Code:

ID      Price    Tag    Name
----- ------- -----  --------
A      100      te st1  te, st1
B      200      tes,t2  tes t2

using FS=" " on above will yield [A 100 te st1 te, st1]

regards

You can use the substr function, if the width of the fields are 7, 9, 7 and 7 you get those fields as follow:

To print the fields you can do something like::

Code:

awk 'NR < 3 {next} {
field1=substr($0,1,7)
field2=substr($0,8,9)
field3=substr($0,17,7)
field4=substr($0,24,7)
print field1
print field2
print field3
print field4
}' file

Regards

Hi,

Thanks for your help