UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Try:

Code:

awk -F"\t" -v RS="\r" -v ...

Code:

awk -v RS='\r' -F'\t' ... 'script' file(s)

is what you asked for, but you probably want:

Code:

awk -v RS='\r\n' -F'\t' ... 'script' file(s)

or to get rid of the carriage returns (which is highly preferable if you want to process the output with UNIX system tools):

Code:

awk -F'\t' ... '{sub(/\r/, "")};script' file(s)

in standard awk RS can only be a single character, or if more that one character is provided, only the first one will be used (gawk and mawk can use regex , but BSD awk on OSX cannot). Also, the OP is mentioning a MacOS CR delimited file.

Yes, you're right. Mac OS X uses <newline>; earlier versions of Mac OS used <carriage-return>. I use Mac OS X, but never did much with earlier versions of Mac OS and I had (incorrectly) assumed that earlier Mac OS operating systems used <carriage-return><newline> character pairs like DOS and Windows.

Note that if you're reading a Mac OS 9 or earlier format file and want the output in the same format, you need to set ORS as well as RS to <carriage-return> (i.e., ORS='\r'), and you need to change any \n sequences in printf format strings and in print arguments to \r.