Re: A very simple question on SED or AWK for a GURU, possibly a lisp script or emacs batch processing of many files

[Alan Mackenzie]

gnuist006 <gnuist006@hotmail.com> wrote on 13 Jan 2003 16:03:15 -0800:
> Here is the type of lines I have in a file:

> junk  label="junk1/junk2/junk3/.../junkn/" more junk

> I want to find every line that has

> label="..."

> pattern

> and then I want to replace every / by _ inside the
> quotes.

Sounds like awk could be your tool of choice.  Using gawk:

cat file |
gawk 'BEGIN {FS = "\""; OFS = "\""}; /[a-zA-Z_0-9]+=/ {gsub("/", "_", $2)}; 
{print}'

(or something very like it) will do the job.  Note:  I haven't tested
this.  The solution assumes that the "junk" at the beginning of each line
doesn't contain any "s.

I would guess that alternative solutions, whether in Emacs lisp or
perl or whatever would be much longer than this one-liner.  The
newsgroup comp.lang.awk might be a better place to ask such questions.
Alternatively, email me if the above gawk program doesn't "quite" work,
or you want me to explain it.

> gnuist.

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Munich, Germany)
Email: aacm@muuc.dee; to decode, wherever there is a repeated letter
(like "aa"), remove half of them (leaving, say, "a").