[Gllug] Awk and filenames with spaces in them

[Martyn Drake]

On 25/09/2007, Wulf Forrester-Barker <basswulf at googlemail.com> wrote:

> Thinking around the problem, is it possible to either prevent names
> with spaces being used or to force the log file to use a different
> delimiter? Either of those would then make parsing the logs simpler.

Nope.  We're talking about people working in the entertainment
industry here - not a chance in hell of stopping that from happening
and thus I must build as much error checking and user friendliness as
it is possible. :)

> Alternatively, you could either check the number of fields in a given
> line and ignore / report on those that don't give the number you
> expect. Stepping beyond that, there may be other ways you can describe
> the field you want to extract and measure, such as "the third before
> the end" ($NF - 3? I'd have to check to be sure) instead as the more
> obvious "X from the beginning" ($X).

Indeed, I hadn't realised about the variables that awk can use and as
such I got around the issue with counting the number of bytes by
counting back using $NF.  As for getting the actual filename which is
completely encased in double quote marks, awk -F\" '{ print $2 }' did
the trick nicely and I can then manipulate the filename accordingly.

Thanks all.

Regards,

Martyn
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Email  : martyn at drake.org.uk
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