awk/gawk to separate data

nails January 13, 2012 at 09:51:50

First, please don't crosspost. Second, I see no way of doing this other than placing a space at positions 12, 14, 16, 21, 22, 25, 26, 27, and 32 in order to create 11 columns. That means parsing the line by character position. Third, awk is not the best tool for doing that in my opinion. This is a Linux solution: #!/bin/bash while read line do mypos=0 len=${#line} # length of line myline=$(echo "$line"|tr ":NW" "BGR") len=${#myline} # length of myline while [[ $mypos -le $len ]] do # get the next char position mypos=$((mypos+1)) # grab the character mychar=$(echo "$myline"| cut -c$mypos) # if statement is all on one line if [[ $mypos -eq 12 || $mypos -eq 14 || $mypos -eq 16 || $mypos -eq 21 || $mypos -eq 22 || $mypos -eq 25 || $mypos -eq 26 || $mypos -eq 27 || $mypos -eq 32 ]] then # print a space echo -n " " fi if [[ $mypos -eq $len ]] then # print the character echo "$mychar" else echo -n "$mychar" fi done done < myfile.txt Fourth, if you really insist on awk, you can use the awk internal substr function to parse the record. I will do the first 3 columns for you, and leave the rest to you: awk ' { gsub(":NW","BGR") col1=substr($0, 1, 11) col2=substr($0, 12, 2) col3=substr($0, 14, 2) printf("%s %s %s\n", col1, col2, col3) } ' myfile.txt # end awk script Here is how you use substr: substr(s, p, n) returns the suffix of s ($0 in this case in the entire line), starting at position p, for a length of n