[ILUG] text processing gotcha

[Ray Kelly]

Ladies & gents.

first off apologies for the lack of word wrapping.

I've a box which I want to plot some net stats off, I've been hiveing off the info
by a cron'd "date && ifconfig eth0 >> file.txt" or something similar
after some simple chewing up this has been cleaned/messed to look like the 2
entries below

Tue Jun 20 19:05:01
	RX_packets	2592614097
	TX_packets	805880200
	RX_bytes	703292011	(670.7 MiB)	TX_bytes	81181281	(77.4 MiB)
Tue Jun 20 19:10:01
	RX_packets	2592830080
	TX_packets	805966932
	RX_bytes	989510909	(943.6 MiB)	TX_bytes	150113768	(143.1 MiB)

The basic way that this is now formatted is
Date   {cr}
{tab}  RX  {tab} rx_figure {cr}
{tab}  TX  {tab} tx_figure {cr}
{tab}  RXB {tab} RXB_figure {tab} (blah){tab} TXB {tab} TXB_figure {tab} (blah) {cr}

what I'm trying to do now is to pull all of of this onto one line so
that a carrige return followed by a tab should get replaced by a tab, (I think)
ie get it into the form

date {tab} RX {tab} rx_figure {tab} TX {tab} tx_figure {tab} RXB {tab} RXB_figure {tab} (blah){tab} TXB {tab} TXB_figure {tab} (blah) {cr}
once that's done it can be fired of to whoever so that they can do
whatever they want with excel to it ;)

I've attempted to do this using tr
"cat eth_status.txt | tr '\n' '\t' >> test.txt" which gives me an output with
one line of 5237664526 chars long, not ideal ;(

is there something I can do to adjust that tr statement so that CR's / newlines which
are immedeiatly preceded by a right bracket are ignored ?
or if there's a way of doing it without tr, I might even attempt perl ;)


thanks
	Ray ...