Replace text in column in multiple lines unix

nails September 22, 2011 at 22:02:49

This link is a similar explains a similar situation: http://www.computing.net/answers/un... I originally presented a script that cut the string into pieces. The next solution was an eleant perl soution. I might give it a shot over the weekend if you want perl solution. otherwise, you can modify my original cut example.

nails, yes, please if you have time? thanks I have so many files with so many lines and every lines in column 17 and column 50 I need to replace the value of 1910 to 2010 and 1911 to 2011 only in column 17 and 50. I thank you for your kind and great effort.

nails September 25, 2011 at 22:21:44

If your perl script is called myperl.ss, call it with 2 command line arguments - the first is the source file (input) and the second is the destination (output) file: myperl.ss <inputfilename> <outputfilename) Let me know if you have any questions. #!/usr/bin/perl use warnings; use strict; my $src = shift @ARGV; my $dest = shift @ARGV; open(IN, '<', $src) or die "Cannot open inputfile $src: $!\n"; open(OUT, '>', $dest) or die "Cannot open outputfile $dest: $!\n"; while (<IN>) { # check the substring at position 17, perl strings start counting from 0 not 1 my $s1 = substr($_, 16, 4); if ($s1 eq "1910") { substr($_, 16, 4) = "2010"; } $s1 = substr($_, 49, 4); # check the substring at position 50, perl strings start counting from 0 not 1 if ($s1 eq "1911") { substr($_, 49, 4) = "2011"; } print OUT $_; } close IN; close OUT;

thanks a lot you really did a great job...it works