All,

I have a simple question. We have a bunch of files containing only alphanumeric characters where we need to attach a header.
Note that the second parameter in the header is the first parameter of each row.

Example - the original file is:

antl 203040.000 102039.000 white 2.00 1.00
antl 203041.000 192030.000 white 2.00 1.00
antl 203043.000 102830.000 blue 2.00 1.00
antl 253040.000 102730.000 blue 2.00 1.00
antl 203640.000 102037.000 blue 2.00 1.00


The edited file shall be like:

PROFILE antl TYPE 2
antl 203040.000 102039.000 white 2.00 1.00
antl 203041.000 192030.000 white 2.00 1.00
antl 203043.000 102830.000 blue 2.00 1.00
antl 253040.000 102730.000 blue 2.00 1.00
antl 203640.000 102037.000 blue 2.00 1.00


Is there a simple way to write a script and let it recursively run over a number of files ?


many thanks
Luca

Pipe "find" into "sed"?

Before:

$ cat tempfile
antl 203040.000 102039.000 white 2.00 1.00
antl 203041.000 192030.000 white 2.00 1.00
antl 203043.000 102830.000 blue 2.00 1.00
antl 253040.000 102730.000 blue 2.00 1.00
antl 203640.000 102037.000 blue 2.00 1.00

Code:
for i in `ls`; do header=`head -n 1 "$i" | awk '{print $1}'`; header="PROFILE $header TYPE 2"; echo $header | cat - "$i" >"$i".new; done; for j in `ls`; do if [ "${j##*.}" == "new" ]; then mv $j ${j%.new}; fi; done


After:
$ cat tempfile
PROFILE antl TYPE 2
antl 203040.000 102039.000 white 2.00 1.00
antl 203041.000 192030.000 white 2.00 1.00
antl 203043.000 102830.000 blue 2.00 1.00
antl 253040.000 102730.000 blue 2.00 1.00
antl 203640.000 102037.000 blue 2.00 1.00

If you want it to actually recurse through directories, not just get every file in the current directory, it's a bit harder...I'm fairly sure the first part would be ok with an ls -R instead of just ls (and maybe a grep -v or something to make it ignore directories), but I'm not don't think that the 2nd part would. If you need that, let me know and I'll pound on it a bit more.

HTH

Pfew... I learned some new bash syntax today. May I nevertheless propose to simplify that to:

With recursion added as a bonus.

Groetjes,

Kees-Jan

Oh very nice I can't believe I didn't think of the 'mv $i.new $i' ....d'oh! Sometimes I think too much about things...
I'm pretty weak with find (I can manage -name and -regex, but that's about it), but that -file is definitely a handy thing to remember.

Find can do a bit more, the -exec command will remove the need for the "for-in-do-done" loop.

Awk can do more too, removing the need for pipes and thus speeding things up a bit.

O_o

...and I was excited when I found out about {print $1}...

*goes to find awk tutorial*

Wow....
I'm impressed and horrified, all at the same time. You just made my day ;-)

Groetjes,

Kees-Jan