UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi,

I get some flat files with trailer which gives the totol records count and i want to remove the trailer from the file.

i used the following command it works fine with a single file.

cat file_name | grep -v 'Total records:' > file1
mv file file_name

But i dont know how to remove the trailer when we have more than 1 file and how to redirect them and move them back to the original file name

The syntax of file is :

<date>.file_name.txt

something like 06222007.aaa_ddd_ccc_ddd.txt
06212007.aaa_ddd_ccc_ddd.txt
06202007.aaa_ddd_ccc_ddd.txt

Regards,
Kumar

Code:

#!/bin/ksh
for i in `ls -lrt *file_name.txt|awk '{print $9}'
do
   grep -v 'Total records:' $i > $i_new
   mv $i_new $i
done

Simple !!!!

Not as simple as it should be.

Code:

for file in *file_name.txt ; do
   grep -v 'Total records:' $file > ${file}_new
   mv ${file}_new $file
done

or even simpler if you have gnu sed

Code:

sed -i '/Total records:/d' *file_name.txt

Try this

Code:

for filename in `ls -1  *aaa_ddd_ccc_ddd.txt`
do 
sed -e '$d' $filename > /tmp/tmpfile
mv /tmp/tmpfile $filename
done

This assumes your trailer is last line always!

RishiPahuja, if you used the same sed expression as I did in the gnu sed you would not depend on it being the last line.

Don't do this. The shell has glob pattern, the ls is not required and will break the code if there are spaces in the filename.

The correct way to do this is:

Code:

for fillename in *aaa_ddd_ccc_ddd.txt

Thanks a lot friends.I will try these methods and let you know.Thanks again.

Hi,

When i run the following code,it gets into an infinite loop and never comes out.
#!/usr/bin/ksh
cd /space/tmp/file

for filename in *aaa_ddd_ccc_ddd.txt
do
grep -v 'Total records:' > $filename_new
mv $filename_new $filename
done