AWK with nondelimited files

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Greets all. I have a record "123456789" and I wish to print $1$2"," and $8-EOL

I have looked many places. I have tried gawk -F"" but no luck. I appreciate your help.

Most sincerely,
Rick

2

What would be $1, $2, and $8 in your example? Anyway, with non-delimited files man cut (POSIX) might better suit your needs.

3

Try it with a space between -F and the quotes "":

awk -F ""

instead of:

awk -F""
4

I've always found cut a pain to use it's so limited e.g. If I wanted fields $8, $8 and $2 it outputs the fields in input order and only once! Not what I asked for:

$ echo "123456789" | cut -c8,8,2
28
$ echo "1,2,3,4,5,6" | cut -d, -f5,2,1-2
1,2,5
5

I wasn't clear enough. I want to print out, from an undelimited record, for example: 1234567890 is the record and I want to print the third and fourth characters, then everything from the eighth to the end of the line.

Thanks again,
Rick

6 
echo 123456789 |awk -F "" '{print substr($0,3,2) substr($0,8)}'

3489
7

Well, this is one of the rare cases where cut will actually do what you need (as you want characters in the source order and you don't require any duplicates):

$ echo "123456789ABCDEF" | cut -c3-4,8-
3489ABCDEF
8

Dear rdcwayx and Chubler_XL,

You are the greatest. thank you both so very much. I have it now.

Most sincerely,
Rick D