Format a date in a csv file

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

So I have a csv file where the 3rd field is a date string in the format yyyy-mm-dd. I need to change it to mm/dd/yyyy. So each line in the csv file looks like:

StringData,StringData,2009-02-17,12.345,StringData
StringData,StringData,2009-02-16,65.789,StringData

Any idea how I can keep everything else in place and just change the date format on that 3rd field for each line?

Thanks,
Ric

2

One approach:

awk -F, '{split($3,a,"-");$3=a[2]"/"a[3]"/"a[1]}1' OFS=, file

Regards

3

You rick. That's perfect. I knew awk was the answer but I'm new to unix scripting so didn't know how to get there. Thanks again!

4

Hi Franklin52,

In your awk command, what does the '1' stands for ? I am refering to the 1 after {} in the awk command, but before closing the single quote (i.e. awk ... '{...}1' ).

thanks

5

awk evaluates the "1" after the brace as true and the prints the current line by default, equivalent to {print}.

Regards

6 
sed 's/\([0-9][0-9]*\)-\([0-9][0-9]*\)-\([0-9][0-9]*\)/\2\/\3\/\1/' a.txt