Subsitute from a position till end of line.

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi,
Having a following file's content, lets say:

ABC|ANA|LDJ|||||DKD||||||
AJJ|KKDD||KKDK||||||||||||
KKD||KD|||LLLD||||LLD|||||

Problem:

Need to replace pipes from 8th occurrence of pipe till end.

so the result should be:
ABC|ANA|LDJ|||||DKD
AJJ|KKDD||KKDK||||
-------
-------

Can someone give me one line sed or may one line perl script?

Thanks in advance !
:slight_smile:

2

if you have Python

# more file
ABC|ANA|LDJ|||||DKD||||||
AJJ|KKDD||KKDK||||||||||||
KKD||KD|||LLLD||||LLD|||||

# python -c "for line in open('file').read().split('\n'):print '|'.join(line.split('|')[:9])"
ABC|ANA|LDJ|||||DKD|
AJJ|KKDD||KKDK|||||
KKD||KD|||LLLD|||
3

Sorry, I don't have python installed !

4 
cut -d \| -f1-8 FILENAME
5

Thanks !
I used cut to achieve this which is quite slow. Is it possible to achieve this using sed or any other utility?

6

Nothing is likely to be faster than cut. It's what cut is designed to do; other utilities will have much more overhead.

7

Thanks !
I was wondering, couldn't we just replace all the pipes(|) from 8th occurrence till end of the line with a new line. I can use this command with Perl as well...I mean I have a Unix shell script in which cut is used but it is quite slow therefore want to simulate the same in Perl. I don't either want to use split and join in Perl. It looks to be quite a bit of extra work.Therefore looking for a utility, may be one liner to get this done....

Any thought!!!

8

how big is your file? how fast do you want it to go?

9

300 MB .... should get over in less than 2 minutes....

10

then cut should be fine, at least on the sample data you provide.

11

Thanks, but how about achieving this in Perl , not using split and join...

12

Perl will probably be slower than cut; I thought you wanted fast.

BTW, running cut on a file much larger than yours (1,732,000,000 bytes) took about 1.5 minutes on my 1.6GHz P4 box.

13

Hmmm...then it is fine...may be I have to fine tune the code..
Thanks Jhonson !