UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi,

In the below line

a|b|10065353|tefe|rhraqs|135364|5347575
dgd|rg|4333|fhra|grhrt|46423|urdsgd

Here i want to cut the characters in between the second and third pipe delimiter and then between fifth and sixth delimiter and retain the rest of the line.

My output should be

a|b||tefe|rhraqs||5347575
dgd|rg||fhra|grhrt||urdsgd

How do i do this?

save the data in a files called test.out
run this awk command from commnd line
awk -F "|" 'BEGIN{OFS="|"}{$3=" ";$6=" ";print}' test.out

This there a way to do this using a cut command?

Because the columns to be cut will be there in another paramfile. I have fixed width file as well as pipe delimited file. In case of fixed width file i will read the position to be cut from the param file and use the below commands. This is done in a script.

position=`grep "abc.txt" $path/paramfile | awk '{print$2}'`
cut -c$position abc.txt > file2.txt

Structure of param file will be like

abc.txt 1-5,68-

In case of delimited files if the same approach could be followed it would be easy.Because for each and every delimited file, the columns to be cut may vary.Hence i cannot hard the position to be cut in your code.

In case the file is a delimited file then the param file will have the information of which columns have to be retained.

like

file2.txt 1,3,4,7-

Can you please tell you requirement with one example it is not clear in your post.
If the fils is a delimeter file where the delimeter specified and in which column of parameter file ?

what is 68- ?? should it be 6-8 instead .... Make your requirement clear to assist you