I was wondering if anyone could help me with my scripting problem, i have been asked by a friend to write a script for unix that will take out the first few characters and the last 2 characters,

There is a lot of files and i was wondering if there could be some sort of script that will go through them for me and make the changes.

If anyone could send me a script or show me where to get one or even tips on how to do this i would be very greatful.

e.g. files with *dat are the files you are interested in:

for FileName in `ls *dat`
do
echo "$FileName" >> newfilename
head -1 $FileName >> newfilename
tail -1 $FileName >> newfilename
e--"
done

Frank

Hi:

I just cut out the columns I want.I made some assumptions you might want to change:

1) I'm looking at just files passed on command line. If you want to look at everything in the director use 'for i in *'

2) I didn't know how many "few" was so I started cutting at position 3.

3) I didn' overwrite the file if it already exists.

Regards,

Nails

#!/bin/ksh

few=3
l2=2

for i in $*
do
if [ -f $i ]; then
len=$(expr $i : '.*') # length of filename
nf=$(echo $i|cut -c$few-$((len-l2)) )
[ ! -f $nf ] && mv $i $nf
fi
done