Inserting a character in a data file

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Can some one tell me how I can insert a "|" (pipe) at the 15th column throughout a file?

examples:
to insert at begining of line i use :g/^/s//\|/
to insert at ene of line i use :g/$/s//\|/

how can i insert at the 15th column position.

Thanks in advance

2

try sed with "tagged regular expressions", like this...

sed -e 's/^\(..............\).\(.*\)$/\1\|\2/g' yourfile > newfile

I just tagged the first 14 columns using
^\(..............\)

and from 16th column to last using
\(.*\)$

in between these two I left a single character belonging to the 15th column untagged...

in the replacement string, I reproduced the two tagged portions with a pipe in the middle using...

\1\|\2

in the above code I was replacing the 15th column with a "|", if you want to insert a pipe in the 15th column...

sed -e 's/^\(...............\)\(.*\)$/\1\|\2/g' yourfile > newfile

Cheers!
Vishnu.

1 Like
3

works great !

Thanks