UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

awk -

Code:

awk '{print substr($1,1, length($1)-8), $2, $3}'  filename > newfilename

Getting closer. Thank you.

The output file is now two lines long though, reading:

It looks like it performed the task on the first line, then somehow stopped and only printed the first column of the second line and all the other lines are gone. Perhaps it is something to do with delineating newlines in my file and the "awk" commands? (the file is tab-delimited txt saved from Text Editor in Mac OS).

(I'm working with biological data, I'm a reasonably intelligent person trying to work with large datasets but I am not a programmer. Solving these issues with programming instead of manually saves many, many, many hours for myself and coworkers so I appreciate the assistance).

If your file is tab-delimited:

Code:

sed 's/\(.*\)-[^\t]*\(.*\)/\1\2/' file

If your sed version doesn't support the "\t" as a tab character type <Ctrl-v><TAB> instead of \t.

Regards