awk

I’ve recently needed to append several lines of data to a SAS data step that I collected and built via a shell script. For search-and-replace in bash I typically use sed, but this time I ran into a problem - sed does not like multiline shell variables.

I am currently working with a database provided by the North Carolina Department of Public Safety that consists of several fixed-width files. Each of these has an associated codebook that gives the internal variable name, a label of the variable, its data type, as well as the start column and the length of the fields for each column.