CODEWITHSUNDEEP
linuxunix
Venkata
Venkata

Reputation: 51

How to use cut and paste commands as a single line command?

In Unix, I am trying to write a sequence of cut and paste commands (saving result of each command in a file) that inverts every name in the file(below) shortlist and places a coma after the last name(for example, bill johnson becomes johnson, bill).

here is my file shortlist:

2233:charles harris  :g.m.     :sales     :12/12/52: 90000
9876:bill johnson    :director :production:03/12/50:130000
5678:robert dylan    :d.g.m.   :marketing :04/19/43: 85000
2365:john woodcock   :director :personnel :05/11/47:120000
5423:barry wood      :chairman :admin     :08/30/56:160000

I am able to cut from shortlist but not sure how to paste it on to my filenew file in same command line. Here is my code for cut:

cut -d: -f2 shortlist

result:

charles harris
bill johnson
robert dylan
john woodcock
barry wood

Now I want this to be pasted in my filenew file and when I cat filenew, result should look like below,

harris, charles
johnson, bill
dylan, robert
woodcock, john
wood, barry

Please guide me through this. Thank you.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 184

Answers (2)

P.P
P.P

Reputation: 121357

You could do it with a single awk:

awk -F: '{split($2,a, / /); if(a[2]) l=a[2] ", "; print l a[1]}' shortlist

I am assuming that if you don't have a second name, you don't want to print the comma (and you don't have more than 2 words in the name).

Upvotes: 2

Mureinik
Mureinik

Reputation: 311163

Once you've used cut to split up the string, it may be easier to use awk than paste to produce the result you want:

$ cut -d":" -f2 shortlist | awk '{printf "%s, %s\n", $2, $1}'

Upvotes: 1

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