sed: transforming 'ls-laR' output into a list with absolute paths
 

Hello, this is my first post :)
First i would like to thank you all for answering other people questions because I've been able to learn from the forum a lot.

I need your help with something.
I have standard output from 'ls -laR /etc' command which looks like this:
by using sed command:
I have transformed it to the following form:

and now I would like to achieve absolute paths at the end of each row


How do I join(merge) filenames with corresponding absolute path to their parent directory?



I know how to extract filenames using awk and get this:
but I don't know what to do next. Should I use some hitech sed option or go for loop or try with arrays? Help. Heeeelp :)

your probably better off learning how to print with find. heres an e.g.:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...1/#post5343834

That's a pretty big request, as there's no telling how many directories deep that the "ls -laR" command will go.
You can get the same output that you're going for with:

find /etc -type f -exec ls -al {} \;

That will give you what you're looking for, a directory listing of all the /etc files, and their complete path to root, and their full "ls -al" attributes, but for files only (not directories themselves, only their contents).

If you want to include symbolic links, etc. as well as files - then I'd just get everything that's not a directory...

find /etc ! -type d -exec ls -al {} \;

Thanks guys. I forgot to say that I know "find", but it's not me whose generating input file in this form.
This kind of file is a snapshot of permissions from few years back and I need to compare it with current ACLs on the system.
So still looking for an idea for converting this "ls -laR" kind of file to "find" like file.

On your transformed sample
this awk code seems to achieve what you want.

OMG this is fantastic. Thank you! You have convinced me to learn awk :)
I need to be honest with you. I have not been just waiting for solution for 3 hours. I've been trying to solve this... and I did (to my surprise).
Your code much better however.

Anyway just for the record here's what I got:

You could of course do all that clean-up work in awk as well, and not need the temp files.
Happy learning - awk is very flexible. Lots of knowledgeable people here to help when you run into brick walls.