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Date: Tue, 19 Sep 2006 14:35:31 -0400 (EDT)
From: Thomas David Rivers <rivers@dignus.com>
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To: fydernix@gmail.com, jhs@berklix.org
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Cc: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: sed and comma-delimited file
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"SigmaX asdf" <fydernix@gmail.com> wrote:
> Yo;
> 
> I have a series of comma-delimited text files with fourteen columns of
> data and several hundred rows.  I want to use a short shell script to
> strip them of the last 9 columns, leaving the same file but with just
> five of its columns.  I can do it in C++, but that seems like
> overkill.  How would I go about doing it with sed or a similar
> utility?

 Uh.. is there no reason the cut(1) program doesn't do this?

    #!/bin/sh
    cat file | cut -d',' -f1-5 > /tmp/t.$$
    rm -f file
    mv /tmp/t.$$ file

 This doesn't preserve permissions, etc... but - it's pretty
 straight-forward.

	- Dave Rivers -

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