Need help to create a basic search and replace function.

str1fe · 01-11-2010, 12:02 PM

Hello, i have a file of lines that looks like this:

Code:

1          0200000067038 0040209060128
1          0200000069834 0050209060129
1          0200000060350 0040209060129
1          0200000063979 0040209060129
1          0200000064457 0060209060129
1          0200000064464 0030209060130
1          0200000067465 0060209060130

What i need to do, is to remove the space in the middle of the
letters and change the letter at the beginning to 2.
I also need to cut the first spaces down to 4.

When done, it should look like this:

Code:

2    02000000670380040209060128
2    02000000698340050209060129
2    02000000603500040209060129
2    02000000639790040209060129
2    02000000644570060209060129
2    02000000644640030209060130
2    02000000674650060209060130

I haven't done any s&r's before but i see that this could be really
nice to learn.

Help is greatly appreciated and if someone have some guides or
tutorials to recommend on everything from simple to advanced s&r it would be very nice.

devnull10 · 01-11-2010, 12:14 PM

Code:

awk '{print 2,"  ",$2 $3}' < f

Where f is the file

Code:

$ cat f
1          0200000067038 0040209060128
1          0200000069834 0050209060129
1          0200000060350 0040209060129
1          0200000063979 0040209060129
1          0200000064457 0060209060129
1          0200000064464 0030209060130
1          0200000067465 0060209060130
$ awk '{print 2,"  ",$2 $3}' < f
2    02000000670380040209060128
2    02000000698340050209060129
2    02000000603500040209060129
2    02000000639790040209060129
2    02000000644570060209060129
2    02000000644640030209060130
2    02000000674650060209060130

str1fe · 01-11-2010, 12:23 PM

Thank you for a very fast reply!
You just saved me from manually editing thousands of lines like that.

I will definitely look for awk tut's

devnull10 · 01-11-2010, 12:34 PM

Not a problem. Bear in mind however that the "2" is hard-coded so if you want to do something different for a number other than 1 (if the case can exist) then you will have to cater for that. If you look up awk then you will be able to find easily how to do this.

Also, you have probably realised, awk writes to stdout, so you need to redirect the output to an appropriate file

Code:

awk '{print 2,"  ",$2 $3}' < f > newfile.txt

str1fe · 01-11-2010, 01:05 PM

Thanks. In this case, all the lines will start with 2. It may vary per file, but i'll just edit that manually because it's only a few files.
Thank you very much