Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi all,

For no particular reason, I would like to use awk on a file that contains multiple columns, but let's say only columns 1 and 2 have some text values, and the remainder of the line contains text that I would like to treat as one column, considering I have spaces as delimiter for the columns, e.g.:

Code:

alpha 200 this is a comment for this record
bravo 400 this is another comment for this record

I would like awk to output $1, $2 and $3 as

$1 = alpha
$2 = 200
$3 = this is a comment for this record

Ideas?

Assuming your comments do not contain doublequote:

Code:

sed 's/ / "/2;s/$/"/' yourfile | xargs -n1

nice, but I was looking for a way to do it in awk... any ideas?

Code:

awk '{a=$1"\n"$2;sub(".*"$3,$3);print a"\n"$0}' yourfile

Code:

awk 'sub(".*"$3,$1RS$2RS$3)' yourfile

That is nice... would it be a trouble for you to explain to me what each part does? (sorry, I am really a newcomer)

This doesn't capture all fields from $3 to NF. Please re-check.

Here's one:

Code:

awk '{a=$1; b=$2; c=$3; for(i=4;i<=NF;i++){c=c" "$i}; print a"\n"b"\n"c} ' file

It looks better, sorry I maybe did not express correctly, I still need the columns to show on the same row, I just want awk to treat from $3 forward (for as many delimiters it may have on that line, $4, $5, $6, etc) as $3, so the output would be $1 $2 $3, e.g.

print $3 would print "this is a comment for this record"