Grep Help

UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users
1

Hello everyone!! I'm having an issue I hope someone can help me with. I have a data file that's comma delimited, but there are 14 lines that have 2 quotes in front of the text and 2 quotes after the text. Ex. ""abcdefg"". The data should read, "abcdefg". Can you please tell me how I can pull the ""abcdefg"" data out of the file using grep, or any other command? Any help with this will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Larry

2

You can easily get the lines containing adjacent double quotes with:

grep '""' file

or, perhaps slightly faster with:

grep -F '""' file

or:

fgrep '""' file
3

Are you really sure the data should read "abcdefg" ?? Using doubled double-quotes is, for instance, IBMs way of denoting a "second quoting level" in LPAR profiles, for instance:

attribute="string1"

but

"attribute=""string1 with spaces"",""string2 with spaces"",""[...]"""

like here:

hscroot@hmc # lssyscfg -r prof -m myMS --filter "lpar_names=mylpar"
name=default_profile,lpar_name=mylpar,lpar_id=1,lpar_env=aixlinux,[...]
"virtual_fc_adapters=""4/client/2/vios1/41/c0507608ac0c000c,c0507608ac0c000d/0"",""5/client/3/vios2/41/c0507608ac0c000e,c0507608ac0c000f/0""",
[...]

I hope this helps.

bakunin