I want to split a text file into several ones. One new file every time the pattern appears. Example: The pattern will be PAT
Original file content:
PAT --example html ABC DEF PAT --example html GHI JKL PAT --example html MNO PQR (and so on)
The original file is called original.txt I would like to get files like so:
$ cat page01.txt ABC DEF $ cat page02.txt GHI JKL $ cat page03.txt MNO PQR (and so on)
Ideally with commands like grep, awk... The renaming of the files is secondary, but would be a plus to help classifying them. Thanks in advance.
3 Answers
You could use awk with some redirection:
awk -F/ '/^PAT/{close(file);file = $NF; next} /./{print >> file}' foo The result:
$ head page0* ==> page01 <== ABC DEF ==> page02 <== GHI JKL ==> page03 <== MNO PQR Essentially, for each line beginning with PAT, I'm saving the last field (via a field separator of /) the variable file, and then printing every non-empty line (/./ matches lines with at least one character) to the name contained in file.
Note that it's important to close the previous file at each loop to prevent a "makes too many open files" error when there's "a lot" of file created.
Since @muru beat me to the awk solution, here's a Perl approach (but use @Muru's instead, it is simpler and more efficient):
perl -00ne 's#PAT.*/(.*)\n##; open($F,">","$1.txt"); s/\n\s*(\n|$)//g; print $F "$_\n"' original.txt The -00 makes perl treat paragraphs as lines: a "line" (a "record") is now a paragraph, defined by an empty line. s#PAT.*/(.*)\n## will remove the line starting with PAT from the record, and the parentheses capture the last word after the / as $1.Then, we open $1.txt for writing (open($F,">","$1.txt")) with the file handle $F. The next step, s/\n\s*\n//g; removes blank lines and, finally, the current record is printed to the filehandle $F with print $F "$_\n".
To use everything after the // as a name, try:
perl -00ne 's#PAT.*//(.*)\n##; $k=$1; $k=~s#[./]##g;open($F,">","$k.txt"); s/\n\s*(\n|$)//g; print $F "$_\n"' original.txt On your example, that would result in the following files:
askubuntucompage01.txt askubuntucompage02.txt askubuntucompage03.txt Also have a look at csplit(1):
csplit --suppress-matched --prefix page --suffix-format %02d.txt original.txt '/^PAT/' '{*}' Splits file orginal.txt into separate files when regex pattern found.
page00.txt page01.txt ... 
