How to replace date string on line 'n' with current date? 1

[Kipnep70]

I have a script that I have to edit and change a date on a specific line in the following formatmm/dd/yyyy)

Its on line 38, and its the 9th field in the record. (Assuming that each line is a different record)

There are other dates in the file but I only want that specific what changed. I'm kinda new to awk and unix (I'm still learning quite a few commands in unix) ... anyway is there a way I can somebody help me use awk to replace the old date with the current date?

Would sed be more appropriate for this? (I'd have to learn sed in that case..)

I think sed would be something like: sed 's/??\/??\/06/`date +%m\/$d\/%Y'


any help would be great, tia

Kip

 

[Annihilannic]

sed would be fine. You need to put an address at the beginning of the command though to make it only take effect on line 9. Also you can't use `date ...` inside single quotes as they prevent it from being evaluated.

Also you haven't terminated your backquotes around the date command.

Also you need to use "." instead of "?". ? means "0 or more occurrences of the preceding expression". "." just matches a single character.

Where does $d come from? Did you mean %d?

I think something like this will do what you want:

sed '9s/..\/..\/06/'`date +%m/$d/%Y`'/'[code]


Annihilannic.

 

[feherke]

Hi

Its on line 38, and its the 9th field in the record.

You did not specified if the fieds are separated or fixed length. Supposing that are separated with \t
( tab ) characters :

sed '[red]38[/red]s,[^[green]\t[/green]]\+,NEWDATE,[blue]9[/blue]' /input/file
[gray]#[/gray]    [red]^^[/red]    [green]^^[/green]            [blue]^[/blue]
[gray]#[/gray]    [red]|[/red]     [green]|[/green]             [blue]+- field number[/blue]
[gray]#[/gray]    [red]|[/red]     [green]+- field separator[/green]
[gray]#[/gray]    [red]+- line number[/red]

[gray]# or[/gray]

awk -F '[green]\t[/green]' 'NR==[red]38[/red]{$[blue]9[/blue]="NEWDATE"}1'
[gray]#[/gray]       [green]^^[/green]       [red]^^[/red]  [blue]^[/blue]
[gray]#[/gray]       [green]|[/green]        [red]|[/red]   [blue]+- field number[/blue]
[gray]#[/gray]       [green]|[/green]        [red]+- line number[/red]
[gray]#[/gray]       [green]+- field separator[/green]

Note that the above codes are examples, not solutions. You have to adapt them.

Feherke.

http://rootshell.be/~feherke/

 

[Annihilannic]

Hmmm... I didn't read those field and record numbers right at all, did I?

Annihilannic.

 

[Kipnep70]

This is what I got so far...

awk -F ' ' 'NR==38{$9=system("date +%m/%d/%Y")}1' < altsite-rpt.jwb

but it's returning a '0' instead of the actually date. I assume I'm getting a 0 because the command is running successfully.

 

[feherke]

Hi

it's returning a '0' instead of the actually date. I assume I'm getting a 0 because the command is running successfully.

Right.

awk -F ' ' 'NR==38{"date +%m/%d/%Y"|getline $9}1' altsite-rpt.jwb

[gray]# or[/gray]

awk -F ' ' -v nd=`date +%m/%d/%Y` 'NR==38{$9=nd}1' altsite-rpt.jwb

Advice : let [tt]awk[/tt] read the input file itself, so leave out the less-then ( < ) sign.

Feherke.

http://rootshell.be/~feherke/