replacing whitespaces with carriage returns

[A5k]

Hi all,
I'm a newbie to scripting within unix. I'm using bash and ksh for my scripts. I want to know how to turn a file with a list of variable number of users so that it is columnar.

$ users>>file
user1 user2 user3 user4
$ script file
user1
user2
user3
user4

Thanks,
dAve

 

[olded]

Dave:

Here's an awk script that prints out the Number of Fields, one
per line:

awk ' { for(i=1; i<=NF; i++)
print $i } ' < file > file2

Also, here's a translate command, tr, example I ripped off from the tr SCO Open
Server V man page and modified slightly:

# The following example creates a list of all the words in file, one per line
# in file2, where a word is taken to be a maximal string of alphabetics. The
# strings are quoted to protect the special characters from interpretation by
# the shell; 012 is the ASCII code for newline:

tr -cs &quot;A-Za-z0-9&quot; &quot;[\012*]&quot; <file >file2 # added numerics


Regards,

Ed
Schaefer

 

[bigoldbulldog]

To make the file from list to columnar in a script try out

ex file <<!
%j
w
q
!

or to get columns in stdout try out

sed '
:a
$!{
N
ba
}
s/\n/ /g
' file

Cheers,
ND

 

[A5k]

Thanks!! The sample scripts have given me another little insight into the fun things you can do within scripting.

Thanks again,
dAve

 

[tdatgod]

Hi,
I tried your awk script but the lines in my file were too long.

I ran it through a2p and came out with the following perl script and it works Ok with long lines.

Thanks for help. here is the perl script.

#!/usr/local/bin/perl

$[ = 1; # set array base to 1

while (<>) {
chop; # strip record separator
@Fld = split(' ', $_, 9999);
for ($X = 1; $X < $#Fld; $X++) {
printf &quot;%s\n&quot;, $Fld[$X];
}
}

 

[vgersh99]

awk 'BEGIN{OFS=&quot;\n&quot;} $1=$1' file

OR

cat file | tr ' ' '\n'