shell script question
 

guys need some help with a simple shell script creation

I have a flat text file which has several thousand lines which I need to convert to a csv it's got a consistent format but basically want every time it hit's txt to create a new line with

txt.1,line 1, line 2, line n
txt.2,line 1, line 2, line n
etc

The input file looks like this

txt.1
line 1
line 2
line n
txt.2
line 1
line 2
line n
txt.n
line n

Appreciate any help guys :)

You haven't given the shell environment and UNIX flavour you are using but here are a couple of things you can try, in the examples the file is called 'flatfile'

sed -n 'H;${x;s/\n/,/g;s/^,//;s/,$//;p;}' flatfile

or

xargs < flatfile | tr ' ' ','

Have tried these on AIX 5.3 TL9 SP4 using the Korn Shell Environment.
Should also in theory work in LINUX in BASH

or you could load it into word, and record a macro to do it....

You could do that as a one off....but what happens if he starts to get these on a regular basis, I don't think he would want to ftp/sftp the output everytime into word or excel and then back again ;)

Had to do something similar a few years back when a company used to send us output from one database we didn't have to which we had to translate and input into another. The only way to do this was to use a scheduled shell script and then upload this using an integrated SQL script. It looks like he is doing something similar. :wonder: