UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

You don't really need the max at all. It is effectively doing nothing in your script anyway as you are only taking substrings from 1-9. If theres more than your 'max' it won't grab them, and if there's less than max - you've not acheived anyting by having it. So just skip it alltogether.

Of course if your offsets are changing ...that's a hassle for you.

instead of these 3 lines....
max=11;
line=substr($0,0,max) ;
firstcol=substr(line,0,3) ;

just use => firstcol=substr($0,0,3) ;

etc.

Hey yes Peter.. its perfectly working...

Then this $0 contains the whole record is it??? or

Does it point to the starting position of the record???


Thanks,
Nisha

Ha!

My perl code doesn't require the input to be sorted!

[Dances around the office doing the "Nanny Nanny Boo Boo" Song]

Actually, that's not entirely true, as long as you don't care about the last parameter. It might be out of sync due to not being sorted.

Nisha, $0 is the entrire record.

Aus, Here's my equivalent in awk of your hash in perl. (nah nah na nah nah) - look mum - no sort! The awk associative array (hash). With a few more bells and whistles. ( This one is in use).

/^[^|]*\|[Ss][Ee]/
{
key=$5 $6; edd = x[key];
if ( edd !~ /^[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]$/)
{ edd = substr($18,5,2) substr($18,3,2) ; x[key]=edd } ;
print $1,$2,$3,$4,$5,edd,$6,$7,$8,$9,$13,$14,$15,$16,$17,$18
}

<KungFuMovie>Huh? You may have defeated me with your Southern Hemisphere AwkFu coding style, but my Northern Hemisphere PerlFu coding style is easier to read! I'll get you next time! Ha!Ha!Ha!</KungFuMovie>

I'll remeber this next time I need to do some slicing and dicing in awk. I usually save the simple list processing for awk and the more logic ridden probelms stuff for perl. I have gotten a lot of good stuff out of awk in the past.

Hey Pet,

Now what????? I thought i got clarified and u have inserted a new stuff and as auswipe says its tough to decifer...

U both have to take the responsibility of explaining it to me


Lots of learning.. uhhhhhhhhhhhhh

This thread is getting way too big.... and I'm geeing way too busy...if you're really that keen to understand the awk associative array - then start a thread. I'm gonna close this one.

And Aus - I'd probably use Perl too - if I knew how...just learning it.