----- Original Message ---- From: Greg Freemyer <greg.freemyer@gmail.com> To: opensuse <opensuse@opensuse.org> Sent: Wednesday, May 28, 2008 4:54:09 PM Subject: [opensuse] AWK -- Strange chars used as separators in a CSV like file All, I have a CSV like file that uses the octal single byte char 024 (or cntrl-T) as a comma and 0376 as a quote char and . I need to strip off the last column and discard it, so I thought I could use awk to do it something like. export FS='\024' awk '{print $1,$2,$3}' my_file > my_output It seems to still be useing a space (' ') as the field separator. Any idea what I'm doing wrong? I've also tried FS='\\024' FS='\0376\024\0376' FYI: This may be a one time need and it is only about 500 lines, so using vi to manually do it is acceptable, but the text within the quotes can be very long, so it is hard to work on visually. The good news is that cntrl-T (\024) should never appear within any of the actual fields. Thanks Greg ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- You can do this easily enough with vi (or vim, or whatever clone) You will use the substitute command. I'm not exactly sure what you're trying to change so I'll offer several suggestions: start vi with: $ vi myfile.dat then inside vi type :%s/^v^t.*$// (colon, percent, lowercase-ess, forward-slash, control-v, control-t, period, asterisk, dollar, forward-slash, forward-slash) will delete everything from the last control-t to the end of the line, on every line in the file If I didn't quite understand, please feel free to ask again explaining what I misunderstood and I'll see what I can do. "You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions." — Naguib Mahfouz -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org