Deleting header of Data file In UNIX

[sribuz]

Hi,
I am getting a data file into Unix box and it is generated using COBOL.
The file has Header and footer repeating every page, my objective is to eliminate header and footer and process records between them.

I used sed command to delete Header but the real problem is the previous record is also deleted with header.
When I open the file in vi editor i could see ^L (in blue) between the previous record and header.

I got to know ^L stands for new form.

I need help eliminating header without deleting any records.

Thank you in advance.

[saikir]

Hi,

If you have some kind of record identifier to identify the Header records then you can remove the header records by having a constraint in the Transformer.

Sai

[ArndW]

What "sed" command did you use? If you use a line-oriented command in sed it will not recognize ^L as a line break. Perhaps you could do 2 actions or 2 passes - replace your form feed with a normal line break then remove the headers.

[sribuz]

I used

sed -e "/Header Start/,/End Word/d" orginalfile.dat>newfile.dat

This will search for 'headerStart' and delete lines till it reaches 'endword'.
using this command I have deleted the all header instances and saved into newfile.

FYI we put /Header Start/,/End Word/d in double quotes (as in above statement) if the 'Start Word' or 'End Word' have spaces in between.

[ArndW]

I'm no sed expert, but you could put in

Code: Select all

sed -e 's/\o014/\o015/' -e "/Header Start/,/End Word/d"

[ray.wurlod]

Ask the COBOL developers to generate a file that lacks these headers and footers.
All they need to do is to comment out some statements.

[sribuz]

I'm no sed expert, but you could put in

Code: Select all

sed -e 's/\o014/\o015/' -e "/Header Start/,/End Word/d"

...

Tried the sed command given by you, still deleting the record before the header.

[ArndW]

I was guessing at the sed command. Please the man pages on sed to see what mistake I must have done with the first part; most likely I chose the wrong octal code for the FF character.