AWK Scripting
 

Hello all...

I am quite a begginner with Linux and I need your help, hope you can bare with me.

I want to use AWK for windows for an required action:
The issue follows:

I have a txt file with a very very long line containing multiples of strings like: bulkbulkSTRINGxxxxxxxxxxxxOTHERSTRINGbulkbulkbulk

The x are letters, 12 of them and I want to have an AWK (grep if possible) to strip to another text file the 12 letters (xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) between the given strings.

I keep trying and no success..

Your help will be greatly appreciated.

Horia.

If the file has a consistant location of the xxxxx field. Is it separated by spaces, colon ( : ) or something like that?
An actual snip of the file would be more usefull.

Is the use of awk or grep necessary?

If the position of the x string on each line is fixed, it is easily done with cut, like so: if the x string is positioned from character 13 to character 24.

Otherwise, if the position is not fixed, but rather between STRING and OTHERSTRING as you write, then sed is good;

Or in awk (as originally requested): :}

Cheers,
Tink

SED is really great to use, here is a site with some useful examples of SED:

http://www.student.northpark.edu/pem...d/sed1line.txt

Probably the most common commands I use for bash scripting would be AWK, GREP, SED, CUT and the pipe (|) command. Learn how to combine these commands and you have some powerful text manipulation tools.

In your first message you said that you want to use "AWK for Windows". If you are using Microsoft windows, I would highly recommend installing Cygwin. This will allow you to work in the bash shell and give you all the handy text utilities. With Cygwin/X you can also run X Windows programs such as xpdf or xdvi.

I think that you wanted to add the pattern to another file, which can be done with simple redirection, ie >file2 or >>file2, at the end of the line. Grep also has a 'w" command that can print the output to a file instead. So you could extract different patterns to different files.

If you can download the source for the awk package ( and the awk-doc package ), you can produce a manual and book on AWK and AWK programming. The package should have a "make ps" or "make dvi" or "make pdf" target to produce the books from the source.

Good Luck.