CODEWITHSUNDEEP
unixawk
drbunsen
drbunsen

Reputation: 10689

Using awk to iterate through list of files?

I'm pretty unfamiliar with awk, but I am looking for a way to iterate through all files in a directory and execute a simple awk command. My command is a simple substitution that replaces all tabs with two spaces. 

awk '{gsub("\t","  ");print}'

How can this be extended to loop through a directory and execute the command on all files?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 10022

Answers (5)

tchrist
tchrist

Reputation: 80384

Pass the files to awk on the command line of course:

$ awk 'program' *

But probably it is easier to use

$ perl -pe 's/\t/  /g' *

Or, if you would rather have an in place edit, simply:

$ perl -i.orig -pe 's/\t/  /g' *

Upvotes: 3

Keithy
Keithy

Reputation: 1

A useful snippet, that shows awk processing a list of files as if it is one stream (notice how the line number is used)

find $HOME/.ssh -name "*.pub" -type f \
  -exec awk '{printf "%c) %12s %s...%s %s\n", 64 + NR, $1, substr($2,1,7), substr($2,length($2)-7), $3}' \
  {} +

example output

A)      ssh-dss AAAAB3N...WhdJHA== [email protected]
B)  ssh-ed25519 AAAAC3N...9a5kCpbT [email protected]
C)      ssh-rsa AAAAB3N...fzh3oUGZ [email protected]

Upvotes: 0

PVB
PVB

Reputation: 11

an improved version of Heisenbug's idea

find . -type f -exec awk '{gsub("\t"," ");print}' {} \;

it avoids calling another program like xargs. It seems to be a bit faster with some tests I did.

Upvotes: 1

ghostdog74
ghostdog74

Reputation: 342363

you can do it with one awk command

awk -F"\t" '{$1=$1;print $0 >FILENAME}' OFS=" " file

Upvotes: 0

Heisenbug
Heisenbug

Reputation: 39164

use find and redirect the output to awk:

find . -type f | xargs awk '{gsub("\t"," ");print}'

Upvotes: 0

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