cut add characters

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

i have following fixed width text(also has a delimiter)

id;name;age;comments1;comments2;title;date
to get output as
id;name;age;;;title;date (remove comments but keep the delimiter in between)
i use cut -c1-12,22,32-

suppose if i want to insert another ; somewhere like

id;name;age;;;;title;date

(extra colon before title)
i tried using

cut -c1-12,22,22,32-

i still get same output as 1st. (even if i replace 22 with other position that has ; say 3)
can we do it using cut? i tried to do it using awk and substrings and would like to know if can do with cut

Thanks

2

Hi,
are You sure You don't want to use -f (field) instead?
for example

cut -d";" -f1,2,3 < file

and so on would give You Your output, including the separators and will also accept fields of different lenght. But if You introduce an extra field, an extra semicolon, that will of course affect Your arguments to cut.

Best regards, Lakris

3

Cut cannot do this. Try:

awk '{$4=$5=x}1' FS=\; OFS=\; infile
4

Sorry didn't mention earlier, the comments fields may contain the delimiter ; the reason why Iam using cut.
I guess cut cant do this. Im using

awk '{ print substr($0,1,12)";;"substr($0,32)}'

One thing I observed with cut is

cut -c4-10,1-2,12-15

gives same output as

cut -c1-2,4-10,12-15

and cut performance is bad when used in loop. awk performed well even when used in loop. But the cut command syntax was simpler, the reason I was trying for a solution with it.
Thanks for your replies