UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi all,

I have a requirement here where I am dealing with a dynamic file. Each record in the file can contain anywhere between 1(min) to 42(max) Reject codes. For example I may have one record in the file having 3 reject codes and another record having 5 reject codes. The reject codes will be preceded by a field Reject count which would indicate the number of reject codes present in the record. For example

|FA4|FB56|FB55|FB32|FB21|.....
Here FA corresponds to the field that contains the reject count(4) in this case. And there are four Reject codes(56,55,32 and 21) that follow it.

Now my actual issue is that since there can be a maximum of 42 Reject Codes, we have 42 reject code fields in the target table. Hence I would need a code in UNIX that would check for the count of reject codes line by line(using the reject count column) for each record and depending on its value x(say 4 as in the above scenario) insert 'n' pipeline delimiters(where n=42-x) to the record( 38 in this case) after the the last reject code field(after FB21 in this case) to bring the total count upto 42. This way the first 4 reject code fields in the target table would be populated with values from the file while NULL would be populated for the remaining reject code fields in the target table.This code has to be dynamic in line with the varying reject code counts appearing in the file. Any inputs on this will be greatly applauded..Thanks in advance

Try,

Code:

$ perl -F'\|' -anle '$n=substr($F[1],2);print $_."|"x(42-$n)'

Hi,

Thanks a lot for your reply..But the code aint working. I tried the following command

perl -F '\|' -anle '$n=substr($F[1],2);print $_."|"x(42-$n)' Rej3.txt
Error: Can't open perl script "\|": A file or directory in the path name does not exist.


Here Rej3.txt is the name of the file. One more thing the FA* field(Reject count field ) is present as the seventh field in each record.

Also it will be great if you explain the meaning of each and every part in the command syntax. Thanks