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I am trying to learn the awk command for data table manipulation. It seems like a very useful command and I am starting to understand it, but it is still rather opaque to me...
How can one make the field delimiter null so that each space is a field? Perhaps to change:
abcd
to
cbad
Also, are there easy ways to change all of the fields at once? An example might be adding commas:
blah blah blah blah ... blah blah
to
blah, blah, blah, blah, ... blah, blah
Last question: are there shorthand ways of only taking out one field? This would be easier than specifying each field in the print besides the on I'm taking out.
"awk '{print $1 $2 $4 $5 $6....}' example.txt"
(only missing $3 in order to remove it...)
An example might be:
abcde
to
abde
Sorry to bombard the forum with awk questions, but this is very helpful for me... Cheers!
I am trying to learn the awk command for data table manipulation. It seems like a very useful command and I am starting to understand it, but it is still rather opaque to me...
How can one make the field delimiter null so that each space is a field? Perhaps to change:
abcd
to
cbad
For that kind of thing you'd have to use the
FIELDWIDTHS variable .... BEGIN{FIELDWIDTHS="1 1 1 1 1 1 ...."
Quote:
Originally Posted by will.flanagan
Last question: are there shorthand ways of only taking out one field? This would be easier than specifying each field in the print besides the on I'm taking out.
"awk '{print $1 $2 $4 $5 $6....}' example.txt"
(only missing $3 in order to remove it...)
An example might be:
abcde
to
abde
Sorry, no, not that I'm aware of ... a bit of a kludge
and somewhat slower you could work with a loop.
Last question: are there shorthand ways of only taking out one field? This would be easier than specifying each field in the print besides the on I'm taking out.
"awk '{print $1 $2 $4 $5 $6....}' example.txt"
(only missing $3 in order to remove it...)
An example might be:
abcde
to
abde
set which field to "". eg $1=$2="" means fields 1 and 2 set to "".
If you're using gawk (to which awk is often symlinked), see if you have the gawk info file installed. It's quite helpful, and includes many worked out examples.
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