On Sunday 02 November 2008 03:21:55 David Allen wrote: > My apologies for asking on this list, but I'm stuck without Perl and need > to use awk to generate a report. > > I'm working with a large data set spread across multiple files, but to > keep things simple, say I have A Very Long String that containing records, > each delimited by a single space. I need to print those records in > columnar format, but with only 7 columns per line: > > record1 record2 record3 record4 record5 record6 record7 > record08 record09 record10 record11 record12 record13 record14
Are you dead set on using awk(1)? Because my first thought would be rs(1). cat inputfile | rs 0 7 To turn your space-separated entries into 7 columns. You may need some fiddling about (to avoid running out of memory, space on the line, etc). This is one of my top three sadly-neglected BSD commands everyone should know more about, along with lam(1) and jot(1). Jonathan _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"