UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hello,

I have a file with several lines and I need to trim and pad with spaces the data that are between position 6 and 15 included. Data in position 1 to 5 and after 15 could be anything, and should stay as they are.

For instance, the following records in a file (underscore = space)
ABCDEF_G_H_I_J_KLMNO
12345_67_89_G_H_K_L

Should give
ABCDEFGHIJ_____KLMNO
123456789GH_____K_L

I am a real dummy in Unix, tried to play with awk and sed but this one is too hard for me ! Any help would be really appreciated.

Thanks.

Looks like a sed looper problem, find a space+not-space between 6 and 15, and change it to a not-space space, and if found, try again. Looping sed is not so fast, but when you need tight control, you cannot do too much at once. It's a bit like a bubble sort:

Code:

sed '
  :loop
  s/^\(.\{5\}[^ ]\{0-8\}\) \([^ ]\)/\1\2 /
  t loop
 '

Thanks! I managed to do it the following way using awk

awk '{str1=substr($0,1,5);str2=substr($0,6,10);str3=substr($0,16,length $0);
gsub(/ /,"",str2);gsub(/-/,"",str2);printf str1;printf("%-10s",str2);printf str3 "\n"}

Looks good. FWIW, this awk does the same but it is a bit shorter..

Code:

awk '{s=t=substr($0,6,10); gsub(/[ -]/,x,t); sub(s,sprintf("%-10s",t))}1' infile

That one is nicer, I will keep it!
Thanks.