Trim leading zeros to make field 6 characters long

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi all-

I've got a file that will have multiple columns. In one column there will be a string that is 10 digits in length, but I need to trim the first four zeros to make it 6 characters?

example:
0000001234
0000123456
0000234566
0000000321

output:
001234
123456
234566
000321

2

What scripting langauge are you using to process the file?

3

Try this,

sed 's/^....//g' <Filename>

4

I actually figured it out on my own ---

In case anyone has questions:

using korn shell

i just looped through with this: (the column is the third in the file)

while [ $i -le $recordcount ]; do
Current=`sed -n "$i p" $File | awk '{print substr($3,length($3)-5,6)}'`
i=$((i+1))
done

since I 'm also doing some other processing individually on each field this worked for me....

5

you don't to use that many constructs to trim 4 zeroes.

awk '{gsub(/^0000/,"")}1' file
6

another option is to use perl unpack/unpack to process fixed-width-format string.

while(<DATA>){
	my($a,$b)=unpack('A4A6',$_);
	print $b,"\n";
}
__DATA__
0000001234
0000123456
0000234566
0000000321