Dropping a column into a VI file

[JAW]

I have a large file I have started adding POSITION commands to for
Oracle SQL Loader.

%s /$/POS etere/ will get me the commands; however, I want them
all stacked in the same column for readibility.

How could I do that with regular expressions in VI?

Basically, POSTION(XX,,XX) DECIMAL EXTERNAL all in proper column and
then I can clean-up after that.

M_KY_BA POSITION (1,10) DECIMAL EXTERNAL,
M_LOCATION POSITION (10,14) DECIMAL EXTERNAL,
M_PREM_NO POSITION (XX,XX) DECIMAL EXTERNAL,
M_CUST_NO
M_SSN
M_TX_OFFICE
M_DATE_MDY
M_BILL_GR
M_PREV_DATE_MDY
M_BILL_FL
M_SPT_GAS_CTAR
M_NAME1
M_NAME2
M_ADDRESS1
M_ADDRESS2
M_ADDRESS3
M_ADDRESS4
M_MRDG_SEQ_NO

[Janis Papanagnou]

JAW wrote:
> I have a large file I have started adding POSITION commands to for
> Oracle SQL Loader.
>
> %s /$/POS etere/ will get me the commands; however, I want them
> all stacked in the same column for readibility.
>
> How could I do that with regular expressions in VI?

For editor questions comp.editors is more appropriate.

>
> Basically, POSTION(XX,,XX) DECIMAL EXTERNAL all in proper column and
> then I can clean-up after that.

A way to do that formatting in shell with your data...

while read -r M P C rest
do printf "%-20s %-20s %-20s \n" "$M" "$P $C" "$rest"
done <infile >outfile

And you can of course add also the "POS etere" to the end of the
printf format string so you don't need the manual vi'ing.

Janis

[sandy]

On Mon, 09 Nov 2009 09:57:24 -0800, JAW wrote:

I used that utility some, back in the late 1990s.
But jumped on perlDBI the minute it became available
(write re-usable modules, parse on white
space instead of hard-coded byte positions, etc).