Apologies from a newbie!


 
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# 1  
Old 07-23-2009
Apologies from a newbie!

Apologies because this may have been covered elsewhere, but I DID search but couldn't find exactly what I was looking for.

My problem is as follows....

I'm doing an extract from an Oracle database, my SQL script does some date manipulation and creates the output file with some date details in the title. For example, this month the file will be called MyfileJuly09.txt, next month it will be created as MyfileAugust09, etc...

This file is then to be ftpd onto another server, and I want to automate all of this.

Due to the nature of the SQL statements in my script, my text file has a blank line between the header and data. i.e.

Member No Policy No

1 000000001
2 000000032

What I want to do is to remove the blank line so the file looks like this...

Member No Policy No
1 000000001
2 000000032

It's only this one line I want to remove. I can't remove it in the SQL script itself - all to do with concatenating columns together etc...)

I know I can use sed or perl to remove the blank line, but my problem is that I want to retain the file name!

If I use sed - sed '2,1d' inputfile > outputfile - I need to specify the inputfile name (but that changes each month) and sed wants to create a new output file, but I want to keep the original filename

How can I have a script pick up the correct file, remove the blank line and then save the file with it's original name.

If it helps, there will only ever be one file (the one just created) in the current directory with a name like - Myfile.......

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
# 2  
Old 07-23-2009
See if this helps.


Code:
 
  sed -e '2,1d' file >file.tmp&&mv file.tmp file


Last edited by lathavim; 07-23-2009 at 05:17 AM..
# 3  
Old 07-23-2009
Hello,

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# 4  
Old 07-23-2009
HTH
Code:
$ cat file.txt
Member No Policy No

1 000000001
2 000000032
$ perl -ni -e 'print if !/^\s*$/;' file.txt
$ cat file.txt
Member No Policy No
1 000000001
2 000000032

# 5  
Old 07-23-2009
lathavim / pludi, thank you for your super-fast reply!
DukeNuke2 - apologies for not giving correct subject text!

lathavim / pludi - If I was running either of your commands manually it would work perfectly as I would be able to enter the name of the file I want to modify, however, remember my filename changes each month and I want to automate this.

Using either

sed -e '2,1d' file >file.tmp&&mv file.tmp file
or
perl -ni -e 'print if !/^\s*$/;' file.txt

requires me to enter the filename - but like I said, it changes each month and I want to automate the process. I need the script to actually fill in the filename for me. The file will always start with Myfile, and it will be the only file in the directory starting like this.

I had thought of using

ls Myfile* > nameholder

This creates a file called nameholder, within which is the name of the current months file to be modified.

If I could then somehow get the script to read that file and save the value as a parameter I could then use that parameter in the sed or perl command

sed -e '2,1d' $myfile >file.tmp&&mv file.tmp $myfile

Thanks for your excellent suggestions though.

Any thoughts?
# 6  
Old 07-23-2009
Check this.

Code:
 
myfile=`ls Myfile*`
sed -e '2,1d' $myfile >file.tmp&&mv file.tmp $myfile

# 7  
Old 07-23-2009
Quote:
Originally Posted by lathavim
Check this.

Code:
 
myfile=`ls Myfile*`
sed -e '2,1d' $myfile >file.tmp&&mv file.tmp $myfile

Unfortunately this doesn't appear to work for me. It looks as though $Myfile is actually set to 'ls Myfile*' instead of the ls command being executed and $Myfile being set to the returned file name. Error given is..

'Can't open ls'
 
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