UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I am a UNIX newbee . I have been doing some reading lately but really need help with an an urgent requirement.After almost two days of googling I end up with 0 luck. Hopefully a guru on here will be able to help me out. Here is my requirement:

I have 20 files in a directory with detail records in them. Each detail file has a corresponding Trailer file in the same directory . Both detail and trailer files are fixed width. I need to get the contents of each trailer file and append to its corresponding detail file. Then delete all the trailer files eg.

Detail File: "MyDetailFile.TXT_01-02-2002"
01-02-2002aaaaa23334 JanetBrown female active y D
01-02-2002aaaaa23334 MaryBondfemale active n D
01-02-2002aaaaa23334 JimanJones male active y D
01-02-2002aaaaa23334 LinusWrightmale active n D

Trailer file :"MyTrailerFile.DAT_01-02-2002"
01-01-200201-31-20021 T

Final output for each detail file in the directory should be like this:
MyDetailFile.TXT_01-02-2002
01-02-2002aaaaa23334 janejones female active y D
01-02-2002aaaaa23334 MaryBondfemale active n D
01-02-2002aaaaa23334 janejones male active y D
01-02-2002aaaaa23334 MaryBondfemale active n D
01-01-200201-31-20021 T

Anyone who can help with this I will greatly appreciate....Thanks

This is an "urgent requirement" .... because?

Your homework is due?

No this is not homework.I am not a student. This is for a work project. I have written code with another program to genrate those files but the program does not support merging or and appending files because of the dynamic manner it which the files aare getting generated. My colleague told me that maybe it can be done in unix or Java. Since I am not a UNIX nor JAVA person I reached out to both communities to see if someone can assist. The project has a very tight deadline and this is preety much why I said it is an urgent requirement.

you can go with this if the trailercontent is the lastline in your trailerline.

Appends the detailfilename as the last line..
tail -n1 trailerfilename >> detailfilename

JayAbram thanks much but it is not quite what i am looking for. With you solution I will need to change the filenames manually 20 times. Sometimes my program will generate more than 20 files and I will have to do the same as many time. I want something like a little for loop which will loop through the list of files and append the content of each trailers to its respective detail file.

Detail File: "MyDetailFile.TXT_01-02-2002"
01-02-2002aaaaa23334 JanetBrown female active y D
01-02-2002aaaaa23334 MaryBondfemale active n D
01-02-2002aaaaa23334 JimanJones male active y D
01-02-2002aaaaa23334 LinusWrightmale active n D

Trailer file :"MyTrailerFile.DAT_01-02-2002"
01-01-200201-31-20021 T

Final output for each detail file in the directory should be like this:
MyDetailFile.TXT_01-02-2002
01-02-2002aaaaa23334 janejones female active y D
01-02-2002aaaaa23334 MaryBondfemale active n D
01-02-2002aaaaa23334 janejones male active y D
01-02-2002aaaaa23334 MaryBondfemale active n D
01-02-200201-31-20024 T

Note: the first 10 characters in the detail file name always matches with the last 10 charaters of the matching trailer , this is away to identify each detail and trailer pair for the merging.

Howdy,

written a simple script as below assuming MyDetail and MyTrailer files..
you can add further commands..




#!/usr/bin/sh

for file in '/home/Jay/My*'
do
if [ $file="/home/Jay/MyDetailFile.TXT_01-02-2002" ]
then
echo "found the file"
hcount=`cut -c1-10 MyDetailFile.TXT_01-02-2002 | head -n1`
printf "\n\n"
echo "headercount is $hcount"
tcount=`cut -c1-10 MyTrailer* | head -n1`
echo "trailer count is $tcount"
printf "\n\n"
if [ $hcount=$tcount ]
then
cat $file > lastf ## output is directed to another textfile
fi
else
echo "file not found"
exit 1
fi
done

Thanks againn for your time and effort Jay. I tried the above but I am still not able to get the correct output. I tried to modify it a bit but to no avail. When I tried with more than a detail/traler pair for example with 6 files i.e 3 detail files and their respective trailer file ,I got everthing in one file. If there are 6 files after I run the script I shoud have only 3 files left in the directory and each one should have the contents of the respective trailer that was deleter appended to it.

-----Once the appending and/or merging of each pair of files is done the trailer files are deleted.

---------- Post updated 05-28-12 at 11:03 AM ---------- Previous update was 05-27-12 at 04:28 PM ----------

I figure out another alternative. Thanks again.