UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I have a file named Me_thread_spell.txt that I want to split into smaller files. I want it to be split in each place there is a ;;;. For example,

blah blah blah ;;;
blah bhlah hlabl
awasnceuir
asenduhfoijhacseiodnbfxasd;;;
oabwcuhaweoir;;;

This full file would be three separate files (separated into files by the ;;.

Then I want to rename the resulting files with "comment" and then a series of numbers, such as comment1.txt, comment2.txt, comment3.txt... etc. up to comment2500.txt.

I've been working on splitting and renaming in Terminal and this is all I have come up with so far (below), and it doesn't split the files correctly and it doesn't rename the files. Please help!

split -p ';;;' Me_thread_spell.txt FILE && for file in FILE*; do mv $comment "$(sed '0-9')".txt; done

I'm pretty much lost at this point. I am running Mac OS X with bin/bash. I've been told a script would be easier, but I am not sure how to make one.

Try csplit - not I'm not completely clear on your requirements but this is close:

Code:

csplit -f comment -n 4 Me_thread_spell.txt '/;;;/'

This will create comment0001 -> comment9999, one file for each ;;; string in the file.
IF you need to have the new files named commentnnnn.txt add this:

Code:

ls comment* > t.lis
while read fname 
do
  mv $fname ${fname}.txt
done < t.lis

edit note corrections in red

This will only work if there are no pre-existing files named 'comment[something]' in the directory. Otherwise you get unexpected results. Plus csplit will overwrite files, for example, if there is a comment0022 out there already, it may be clobbered by csplit.

It appears that

csplit -f comment -n 4 Me_thread_spell.txt /;;;/

is exactly what I need, but when I run it, I get an error:

-bash: syntax error near unexpected token `;;;'

Any ideas?

my bad - '/;;;/'

you need single quotes around the regex... see above

Put quotes around /;;;/

In she shell it's a seperator, you could do echo a ; echo b to run two commands on one line. so it has special meaning to the shell and needs quoting to put it in a string.

When I run

csplit -f comment -n 4 Me_thread_spell.txt '/;;;/'

It only separates the main file into 2 files (which aren't text files), rather than the 2500 times that the actual ;;; occurs in my file. It should create 2500 text files, each with an individual instance that includes all the text between ;;; and the next ;;;.

I'm missing something here.... I just can't figure it out!

---------- Post updated 12-02-10 at 02:46 PM ---------- Previous update was 12-01-10 at 11:09 PM ----------

PLEASE HELP! I really don't want to have to copy and paste 2500 files. :-)

You agreed not to bump posts when you registered.

How about awk? It has built-in split-on-string abillities.

Code:

echo "a;;;b;;;c;;;d;;;" | awk 'BEGIN {RS=";;;" ; N=1 } { f=sprintf("comment%d.txt", N++); print $0 > f; }'

this creates comment1.txt through comment5.txt when I run it. Run it on a file like

Code:

awk 'BEGIN {RS=";;;" ; N=1 } { f=sprintf("comment%d.txt", N++); print $0 > f; }' filename

plain awk might not work if the individual records are huge in size, but should work with reasonable sizes, and GNU awk (gawk) can tolerate almost anything...