UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

awk -F, -v OFS="\t" '{ $1=$1 } 1' test1.txt > test2.txt

Like I said, try nawk.

nawk worked..But the file which was tab delimited is just the same..It did not change to comma delimiter..Please advice

The , and tab were reversed. try:

Code:

nawk -F\\t '{$1=$1}1' OFS=, filename > outfile

or

Code:

tr \\t , <filename > outfile

worked perfect..Awesome

Thanks

---------- Post updated at 09:48 AM ---------- Previous update was at 07:01 AM ----------

The problem am now facing is, there is an account say Energy OX Place...Now what this is doing is, its inserting an comma in between that account name as well...How do i get rid of this...Because my file has some 20 columns separated by a Tab and there are accounts with names of that kind...any workaround for this??????

Tabs inside your columns is a pretty big problem. It can tell there's too many columns, but not which ones should go where. You should re-export the data using a delimiter that's not in your data.

If it's a few, specific lines, you might be able to skip those lines and put them in a separate file to process by hand to append to the file when you're done. This may change the order of the lines though.

Code:

$ awk -F\\t -v OFS="," '
        (NF>20) { print $0 > "badlines"; L++; next }
        { $1=$1; print }
        END { print L " bad lines" >"/dev/stderr" }' input > output
$ vim badlines
$ cat badlines >> output

Substitute the exact value of the number of columns for 20... any time it finds a line with too many columns, it will print it raw (unchanged) into badlines for you to hand-edit and exclude them from 'output'.

Are you sure your columns are tab delimited and not fixed width? Could you post a sample, preferably with a line with tabs inside the columns?