[ale] Riddle me this awk man

[Greg Freemyer]

On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 8:11 PM, Geoffrey Myers
<lists at serioustechnology.com> wrote:
> Greg Freemyer wrote:
>> 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
>
>
> To be more specific:
>
> printf "%s-%s-%s %s\n", $3,$2,$4,$5;

Negative.

The first field in the CSV file is space delimited internally and has 5 fields.

So that printf is to print just the first field reformated,

printf "%s-%s-%s %s", $3,$2,$4,$5;

Then I set those 5 fields to null so I don't have to worry with them:
$1=""; $2="";$3="";$4=""; $5="";

Then I print the rest of the original line, but skipping the first 5 delimiters.
print substr($0, 5)

The individual lines seem to be working fine.  It's entire missing
lines that are the problem.

Greg