Question

I have a dat file with some data in it seperated by ‘|’ character.

I want to read each line and take out 5th and 6th column data( date format) from here and then validate the date using unix. I am new to unix . Please let me know how to do it.

Answer 1

Try using an awk script (http://www.manpagez.com/man/1/awk/) for parsing files. Something like

awk -F\| '{print $5, $6}' test.dat

This can then be extended to perform date validation, depending on what validation needs are. For example – http://unix.derkeiler.com/Newsgroups/comp.unix.shell/2003-08/1340.html seems to perform a reasonable amount of validation.