[ILUG] Moving chars about within lines

[Padraig Brady]

How about:

sed -e 's/^\(.\{X\}\)\(.\{Y\}\).*/\1,\2/' -e '/.\{X\},.\{Y\}/!d'

where X = length of field X
and     Y = length of field Y

the second expression just deletes any malformed lines
in case there is invalid input to start with.

Padraig.

Ray Kelly wrote:

> Lo all.
> 
> I've got a number of files which I'm looking to modify, 
> the current line format of each of these, is x chars which I want to
> hang onto immediatly followed by y chars which I'm also looking to keep
> & then the line is trailed with z chars which atm I'm not worried about.
> 
> ie. the objective is to change the format of each line in this file from 
> xyz  to x,y  Does anyone have any pointers on where to find out how to
> do this, as muggins has minimal knowledge of sed/awk/perl which I'd
> presume would be the ways to do this (I know how to do it using excel
> but I'm not even considering that option :)
> 
> thanks
> 	Ray ...