Timeline for unix: get characters 10 to 80 in a file

11 events

when toggle format	what		by	license	comment
Apr 6, 2017 at 15:59	history	edited	Stéphane Chazelas	CC BY-SA 3.0	added 174 characters in body
Apr 6, 2017 at 14:40	comment	added	Stéphane Chazelas		@Kusalananda, no, `RS=` is the paragraph mode. For slurp mode, see Slurp-mode in awk?
Apr 6, 2017 at 10:50	comment	added	Thor		Remove the new-lines before doing `substr`, e.g. `gsub("\n", "")`
Apr 6, 2017 at 10:01	comment	added	George Vasiliou		@Kusalananda Probably you are right....
Apr 6, 2017 at 9:45	comment	added	Kusalananda♦		@GeorgeVasiliou I think that because `RS` is empty, the whole file is read before it gets to the `substr()` call.
Apr 6, 2017 at 9:35	comment	added	George Vasiliou		Since you need to print only the first 80 chars, adding `;exit` after `print substr(..)` might help to improve performance forcing awk to exit and not read the rest file.
Apr 6, 2017 at 9:26	comment	added	ilkkachu		Also, I think you need to count one character for the newline in the middle. (Now you're missing the final `T` from the example.) That gets more annoying if the part to be picked is longer, and especially if the lines are of different lengths for some reason.
Apr 6, 2017 at 9:21	comment	added	Kamaraj		yes.. that's correct. if the file size is very big.. then we encounter with slowness.
Apr 6, 2017 at 9:17	comment	added	Kusalananda♦		I wonder... Does `awk` read the whole file into memory when doing it that way?
Apr 6, 2017 at 9:13	comment	added	gugy		alright, that works. thx!
Apr 6, 2017 at 9:10	history	answered	Kamaraj	CC BY-SA 3.0