Conditional tab replacement sed/awk

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi

I am struggling to find a solutions to this problem:

I have a directory full of files and I wish to:

read each line of each file and

if any one line in those files is longer than 72 characters I want to replace any tab characters with a space character.

Ive been researching/testing sed and awk but cant get anything working in this manner.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

2

Something like this?

awk 'length > 72 {gsub("\t"," ")}1' file
1 Like
3

Exactly like that :slight_smile: Thanks very much!

I'm new to all this, I appreciate the help.

How do I make those changes to the file itself rather than printing the formatted text to the screen?

4

You can't edit files in place with awk, use a temporary file:

awk 'length > 72 {gsub("\t"," ")}1' file > tempfile
mv tempfile file

or maybe with something like:

awk 'length > 72 {gsub("\t"," ")}{print > "tempfile"}
END{system("mv tempfile file")}' file