UNIX for Beginners Questions & Answers

Are you able to install csvtool or csvkit? I know the former is able to work with multiline cells in a csv file; I don't know about the latter.

csvtool has a "call command" option allowing it to call a shellscript or shell function to modify the file one line at a time.

I think for the example you gave:

Code:

flatten() { echo "$1","$2","${3//$'\n'/ }","$4","$5" }
export -f flatten
csvtool call flatten file.csv

This is untested and you will have to try it out.

csvtool has the ablilty to cut and paste columns just like the cut and paste tools, so it might be easier to pull out the problem column, fix it as above. and paste it back into the original file.

I think you need version 4 of bash to get the $'' functionality, or look at using tr: tr '\r' ' '

Andrew