cut and paste?

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

hi,

I have a file with content like this for an employee:

EmployeeID
101
Day_type, day
vacation,1/2/2009
sick day, 3/2/2009
personal day, 4/5/2009
jury duty day, 5/5/2009

how do I make the result to show:

EmployeeID,Day_type,day
101,vacation,1/2/2009
101,sick day, 3/2/2009
101,personal day, 4/5/2009
101,jury duty day, 5/5/2009

I thought I could do copy and paste, but if I do copy and paste, isn't EmployeeID only be in the first row?

thanks

2

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---------- Post updated at 04:00 PM ---------- Previous update was at 03:47 PM ----------

nawk '
  /EmployeeID/ {c=3; header=$0;next}
  c && --c {if(c==2) id=$0; if (c==1) print header OFS $0;next}
  { $0=id OFS $0;print}' OFS=, myFile
3

Here is another way using Perl...

Assuming you have a file "pay1" containing:

EmployeeID
101
Day_type, day
vacation,1/2/2009
sick day, 3/2/2009
personal day, 4/5/2009
jury duty day, 5/5/2009

Here is a perl program "pay1.pl"...

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
while (<>) {                    #while not end of standard input
   chomp;                       #Take of end of line char
   $line = $_;                  #whole line string wo/end of line char
   @a = split (/,/, $line);     #Split line by comma into array
   if ($. == 1) {               #only on line 1
      $col1_title = $a[0];      #Grab text EmployeeID
   }
   elsif ($. == 2) {            #only on line 2
      $col1_value = $a[0];      #Grab 101
   }
   elsif ($. == 3) {            #only on line 3
      $col2_title = $a[0];      #Grab Day_type
      $col3_title = $a[1];      #Grab day
                                #print heading line
      printf("%s,%s,%s\n", $col1_title, $col2_title, $col3_title);
   }
   else {                       #any line other than 1,2,3
      $col2_value = $a[0];      #Grab value of day type
      $col3_value = $a[1];      #Grab value of day
                                #print out 101, type value, day value
      printf("%s,%s,%s\n", $col1_value, $col2_value, $col3_value);
   }
}

You run the program passing the file using standard input...

cat pay1 | perl pay1.pl

Output is...

EmployeeID,Day_type, day
101,vacation,1/2/2009
101,sick day, 3/2/2009
101,personal day, 4/5/2009
101,jury duty day, 5/5/2009
4

Thanks.

I don't have nawk in my box. I have awk.
I used awk instead of nawk and it worked fine.

I understand nawk is newer version. what are somethings nawk can do but awk can't do?

Perl works fine,too.

5

wouldn't hurt to try.....

6

Sorry, after I google about AWK and learned it, I still have trouble to understand your syntax. I understand EmployeeID is the search pattern. OFS is Field Separator comma.

awk <search pattern> {<program actions>}

What I am confused is program action. Could you kindly explain?

  1. what is that mean? c && --c
  2. next; does that mean exit the program action and going to next program action?

Thanks

7

in mnemonic code:

if (c != 0) {
   c=c-1
   if (c != 0)
      doSomethingHere

it means, don't execute any of the following awk code AND advance to the 'next' data record/line.