UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

1)I'm not sure how to identify data pipes, but if we get | in 2 or 3 specific fields like Address and other.
So can we handle ?

If your field delimiter is sometimes a field delimiter and sometimes data, you need to be able to very clearly identify each occurrence of that character as either data or delimiter. If you can't specify a clear rule that unambiguously determines whether a given character is a delimiter or data, there is no way to identify field boundaries.

And when you have field delimiters that are sometimes data AND record delimiters that are sometimes data, you have a real mess.

Your best choice would be to choose a different field delimiter that cannot ever appear as data.

This works for your input data:

Code:

awk -F'|' '$1 ~ /^[0-9]+$/ { if(T) print T; T=$0; next; }
{ T = T " " $0; }
END { if(T) print T; }' allnum.txt

...but cannot be 100% reliable as Don Cragun says. It relies on the first field being all numbers, and if the broken line ever manages to imitate that, it will be fooled. And if | ever appears in a record nothing good will happen.