Running Awk

Hey, Ted:

In the October 19, 2001 issue of Midrange Guru, in the article, "Running Perl On the AS/400 and iSeries," you showed us how to run Perl on the iSeries. Now, tell us how to run awk.

-- Linda

If you are at V5R1 or above and have PASE installed, you can run the AIX version of awk through Qshell. The PASE utilities are in directory /QOpenSys/usr/bin.

Linda, be aware of two important points:

• Awk reads ASCII, not EBCDIC. Codepage 819 works well for input files.
• Awk expects lines of a text file to be separated by linefeed characters, not the carriage return/linefeed sequence.

Here's an example. Suppose you have an ASCII file called phones.txt in the IFS. Each line of the text file contains a name, phone number, and extension. The fields are separated by a colon (:). Phone number and extension may be blank.

Bud::275               
Curly::290             
Larry:(555) 444-3333:  
Lou:(444) 333-2222:199 
Moe::235               
Oliver::145            
Stanley:(777) 888-9999:

If the records are delimited with a linefeed character, this awk command formats the data into columns and writes it to standard output (stdout).

/qopensys/bin/awk '
BEGIN {FS=":"} 
{printf "%-15s%-20s%-5s\n",$1,$2,$3}'  phones.txt

If records end with the carriage return/linefeed sequence, use sed to strip out the carriage returns.

sed 's/\015//' phones.txt | 
/qopensys/bin/awk '
BEGIN {FS=":"} 
{printf "%-15s%-20s%-5s\n",$1,$2,$3}'

Here's the output:

Bud                                275 
Curly                              290 
Larry          (555) 444-3333 
Lou            (444) 333-2222      199 
Moe                                235 
Oliver                             145 
Stanley        (777) 888-9999 

-- Ted

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