asked on

how to use awk and sed in the same command

Trying to use awk and sed together

Have a file and would like to pull out of the file a value and put into a variable.

this is what i have. need to remove the spaces in the vaule

name=$(awk -F"," 'NR==18 {print $2}' | sed 's/ //g' $file )

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

MikeOM_DBA

membership

This solution is only available to members.

To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.

Start Free Trial

woolmilkporc

If you want to keep using your version do it this way:

name=$(awk -F"," 'NR==18 {print $2}' $file | sed 's/ //g' )

$file is a parameter to awk, sed just reads from stdin here and thus doesn't need a filename.

But pure awk as suggested by MikeOM_DBA is certainly better!

simon3270

I certainly prefer Mike's solution (I keep on seeing sequences of sed, grep, tail, awk and others in scripts, thinking that a simple awk script would do all of that in one go).

I think there's a bit missing from the solution though - a trailing ")" and the "print $2":

name=$(awk -F"," 'NR==18 {gsub(/ /,"",$2); print $2 }' $file)

Open in new window

MikeOM_DBA

Thanks simon, It's Friday dyslexia!

bje

ASKER

is cut the best way to determine the first position of a value

so for my variable name, will need to pull out the first position and put into a variable and if it begins with a 4 then do something.

first=$(cut -c1 $name)
if $first = 4
then
do something
else
do something
fi

SOLUTION

woolmilkporc

membership

This solution is only available to members.

To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.

Start Free Trial

bje

ASKER

I've requested that this question be closed as follows:

Accepted answer: 200 points for woolmilkporc's comment #a40767584
Assisted answer: 150 points for woolmilkporc's comment #a40767044
Assisted answer: 150 points for simon3270's comment #a40767464
Assisted answer: 0 points for bje's comment #a40767577

for the following reason:

Thank you

simon3270

Mike should have the points for #40767023 - all I did in #a40767464 was add a small missing section - the idea of sticking with just awk was his.

bje

ASKER

My apologies for the confusion. Thank you