[ale] Riddle me this awk man

[Greg Freemyer]

All,

I'm trying to re-format the first field of a CSV file using AWK.

This is what I'm trying which is very close to working:

cat supertimeline.csv | awk -F" " '(NR == 1) {print};(NR > 1) { printf
"%s-%s-%s %s", $3,$2,$4,$5; $1=""; $2="";$3="";$4=""; $5=""; print
substr($0, 5) }' > mysupertimeline.csv

But:

# wc supertimeline.csv mysupertimeline.csv
   541986   4392932  82668394 supertimeline.csv
   174130    702866  23434337 mysupertimeline.csv

I end up with only about a third as many lines.  How can that be?  The
missing lines seem to be spread around, so it's not like it did the
first 174,130 lines and died.

I simplified it to:

cat supertimeline.csv | awk -F" " ' { printf "%s-%s-%s %s",
$3,$2,$4,$5; $1=""; $2="";$3="";$4=""; $5=""; print substr($0, 5) }' >
mysupertimeline.csv

and I get the same result.  (I have lots of free diskspace, so don't
blame that.)
Boo Hiss!

FYI: this is ubuntu.  I'll try it on cygwin in a second just because I
have the csv file there already.


-- 
Greg Freemyer
Head of EDD Tape Extraction and Processing team
Litigation Triage Solutions Specialist
http://www.linkedin.com/in/gregfreemyer
CNN/TruTV Aired Forensic Imaging Demo -
   http://insession.blogs.cnn.com/2010/03/23/how-computer-evidence-gets-retrieved/

The Norcross Group
The Intersection of Evidence & Technology
http://www.norcrossgroup.com