topic Re: Anyone for scripting? in Operating System - HP-UX

Anyone for scripting?

Adam Noble — Wed, 26 Mar 2003 10:45:13 GMT

I imagine one of you guys will be able to solve my problem very quickly (i hope). I need a script to take a line of input and change the 5-7th character of that input and replace it with 3 alternate characters. I thought tr may be the tool to do this however can't seem to determine the specific format.

Re: Anyone for scripting?

Robin Wakefield — Wed, 26 Mar 2003 11:17:43 GMT

Hi Adam,

Using sed:

% echo abcdefghijkl | sed 's/$^....$...$.*$/\1zzz\2/'
abcdzzzhijkl
%

rgds, Robin

Re: Anyone for scripting?

G. Vrijhoeven — Wed, 26 Mar 2003 11:18:20 GMT

Hi,

for i in `cat file`
do
VAR=`echo $i | cut -c 5-7`
echo $i | sed 's/'$VAR'//'
done

Gideon

Re: Anyone for scripting?

Jean-Louis Phelix — Wed, 26 Mar 2003 11:20:37 GMT

Hi,

sed 's;^$....$...;\1ABC;' file

should replace 5th, 6th and 7th chars to ABC.

Regards

Re: Anyone for scripting?

Adam Noble — Wed, 26 Mar 2003 11:22:24 GMT

Thanks guys much appreciated, even tho the sed command looks a little complex, I think I see what going on.

Re: Anyone for scripting?

Marcin Piwko — Wed, 26 Mar 2003 11:27:55 GMT

This is better than sed:

nawk '{ print substr($0, 1, 4) "XXX" substr($0, 8) }' filename

Where XXX are your alternate characters.

Re: Anyone for scripting?

Jean-Louis Phelix — Wed, 26 Mar 2003 11:30:01 GMT

Perhaps awk would be more 'readable':

awk '{
printf "%s%s%s\n", substr($0,1,4),
"ABC",
substr($0, 8)}'
}' file

will do the same ...

Regards.