sed and comma-delimited file

[Bill Campbell]

On Thu, Sep 21, 2006, Freddie Cash wrote:
>On Tue, September 19, 2006 4:49 pm, Matt Emmerton wrote:
>>> On Tue, September 19, 2006 9:26 am, SigmaX asdf wrote:
>>>> I have a series of comma-delimited text files with fourteen
>>>> columns of data and several hundred rows.  I want to use a short
>>>> shell script to strip them of the last 9 columns, leaving the same
>>>> file but with just five of its columns.  I can do it in C++, but
>>>> that seems like overkill.  How would I go about doing it with sed
>>>> or a similar utility?
>
>>> cat file | awk -F"," '{ printf "%s,%s,%s,%s,%s\n",$1,$2,$3,$4,$5
>>> }' > newfile
>
>> What's wrong with this?
>> cat file | cut -f-5 -c';' > newfile
>
>[shrug] It uses cut, which I've never used or even heard of???  :)

I strongly recommend getting a copy of the book ``Unix Text
Processing'' by Dougherty and O'Reilly which is far and away the
best I've seen for using UNIX tools.  I think it's out of print,
and hard copies are probably found at http://www.bookfinder.com/

There's also a free PDF version available from O'Reilly.

Bill
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