UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Depending upon character at particular position in a line, string needs to be appended followed by empty spaces till 256th column position at the end of the each line in the file.

example:
123p4 J8769
123q4 R2345
123r4 S2345

What I Require is, it has to check at 7th column character and that is J for first line so it should become 123p4 8769 Jaya . J will be replaced my empty space and Jaya will be appended at 14 location followed by empty spaces till 256th column position.

the ideal result is as below:
123p4 8769 Jaya
123q4 2345 Ravi
123r4 2345 Satish

File is huge and all the lines in the file need to be applied above said logic.
Any script help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Jaya

Try something like :

Code:

awk '{ if(substr($0,7,1)=="J") { sub(/J/," ",$0); printf "%-256s", $0" Jaya ";} }' < filename

thanks Dennis, it is perfectly working for 1 st line of the input as your logic addresses one values that is J --- Jaya.
I need to have this code for all the three values. (J ---> Jaya, R ---> Ravi, S ---> Satish). Shall I need to write 3 times by changing variables and finally append 3 files?

Try this:

Code:

awk 'BEGIN{a["J"]="Jaya";a["R"]="Ravi";a["S"]="Satish"}
{print $1, substr($2,2),a[substr($2,1,1)]}' file

Use nawk or /usr/xpg4/bin/awk on Solaris.

Regards

Yes it is working but not giving empty spaces. After Jaya Ravi Satish, empty space need to be filled till 256 column position.

I yeah, forgot that, try this one:

Code:

awk 'BEGIN{a["J"]="Jaya";a["R"]="Ravi";a["S"]="Satish"}
{printf "%-256s\n", $1" "substr($2,2)" "a[substr($2,1,1)]}' file

Regards

Thanks Franklin, it gives what I have requested. I need to add extra logic.
Any line which doesn't have J or R or S, at 7th position, I need to get the length lenght first and appliy logic based on lenght.

my present code which performs line by line in a loop: len=`cat firstline.txt | cut -c39-58 | tr -d ' ' | wc -m`

if len eq 9 append prakash at the end of the line followed by empty spaces as above code does..
else if lengh eq 16 append Dan at the end of the line followed by empty spaces till 256 as above code does...
else if lenth -ne 9 && length -ne 16 append Shelly at the end of the line followed by empty spaces till 256 as above code does...
-----------------
Right now I am doing line by line so there is huge performence hit.. so trying to apply the logic for all lines at once
----------------

Franklin plz help me out in giving the above logic in awk or sed....

Regards,
Jaya