UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I am trying to set up a file for someone and they have a program that was built for UNIX. I am guessing that it is running in some sort of emulator since they are on WinXP. It is a database and we are trying to get all of the addresses out of the database. I talked to the tech support for the software, and if I understood them correctly, this is all that can be done.

The data can be outputted to a file (.tmp I believe) and then the information can be saved out to something else. The problem is that it won't be delimited. It will just be one long string of text according to the tech support. Does anyone have any ideas on what I could do to get this in a usable format. The database is about 6000 names, so if you figure that by about 6 pieces of information per name, there is no way that we can go in and physically delimit it.

In case your wondering, the program was written in the early 80's. The new version will output to databbase files, but the upgrade is 100,000 and they aren't willing to do that.

Help.

Well how about a few clues here?? How are we supposed to know where the delimiters go? Post some sample data. And maybe you should tell us what you want to use as a delimiter.

Well, I will know more tomorrow. I was basically asking if something like this is possible. If it is what has been explained to me, the data has a fixed number of characters for each field. It can be comma or tab delimited, but I would prefer tab. Once I actually get the file, I'll post some info.

Ok. Here is a sample of the file I am working with. Turns out, it did format the text, it just isn't the format we need.

What I need is a spreadsheet with the name in one column, the address line in one column and the city, state, zip in another column.

I don't think this is a Unix problem to solve, but more of an excel issue. Maybe a macro to move the information? I also need it to clean out all the blank lines.

The sample is attached to this.

I guess Windows Excel may solve the problem.

But , using unix scripting also we can solve this.

here's something to start with given your sample file.
Assumptions:
attached is a the output based on your sample input.

nawk -f brand.awk samplefile.txt

brand.awk:

Code:

BEGIN {
  OFS="|"
  CLMN=2
  WDTH=34
}

#------------------------------------------------------------------------
#
function trim(str)
{
   sub("^[ \t]*", "", str);
   sub("[ \t]*$", "", str);
   return str;
}

#------------------------------------------------------------------------
#
pivot == 3 {
  for(i=1; i <= CLMN; i++)
    for(j=1; j <= pivot; j++) {
      split(arr[j], tmpA, SUBSEP)
      printf("%s%s", tmpA[i], (j < pivot) ? OFS : "\n");
    }
  pivot=0
}

!NF { pivot=0; next}

{
   pivot++
   arr[pivot] = trim(substr($0, 1, WDTH-1)) SUBSEP trim(substr($0, WDTH))
}

watch out for typos

pivot == 3 should read pivot = 3