AWK experts - how would I code around this in awk...

[Steve Flynn]

On Fri, Feb 19, 2010 at 1:08 AM, Christopher Chan
<christopher.chan at bradbury.edu.hk> wrote:
> On Friday, February 19, 2010 02:02 AM, Steve Flynn wrote:

>> rec1 123456789012345
>> rec2 67890
>> rec3 12345678901234567890
>>
>> ... then I need to append rec2 to rec1.
>
> You just have to make each line 20 bytes long right. There is no need to
> preserve lines that are already 20 bytes long like in the case that rec1
> + rec2 will not make up 20 bytes and so we chop up rec3 and so on and so
> forth right?

Yup.

A little background info.

The data itself is ripped out of an IBM mainframe, converted from
EBCDIC to ASCII and transferred to me via Connect:Direct.
When it arrived on our AIX platform, the embedded CR/LF's in the data
cause this scenario where we have split records.

I need to come up with a way to join the split lines back together
without concatenating every line together.

The best that the data extract guys could say was that they would make
the file a pre-set fixed width... this then permits me to start
joining lines together with the guarantee that at some point I'll find
that the line I'm currently building is exactly 'n' bytes long, thus
indicating that it's complete. The 20 byte example is just that - an
example. The real value of n will probably be 32K, or whatever the
maximum limit for LRECL is on an MVS mainframe (I forget now but I
think it's 32768 bytes). Of course, this ALL surmises that 32K is
enough to hold the longest record in the source system.

My first though was awk.. but before I started coding anything I
thought I'd throw it out to you guys to see if anyone had a better
solution. Perl is also installed on my development box, much to my
surprise, so I'll give Karls perl a crack of the whip first and then
try to code something up in C, awk, and anything else I can think off
just for laughs.

infa_pc at clp-wmvx-mga01 infa_pc $ perl -v

This is perl, v5.8.2 built for aix-thread-multi
(with 3 registered patches, see perl -V for more detail)





-- 
Steve
When one person suffers from a delusion it is insanity. When many
people suffer from a delusion it is called religion.

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