Question

I recorded some data on my laptop and because the OS system language is German it converted the decimal separator to a comma (didn’t think of that at the time…).

The column separator (there are three columns in the text file) is a comma too and so I end up with six columns instead of three

Example.txt

4,0,5,0,6,0

should be

4.0, 5.0, 6.0

How can I loop through all files in a folder and replace every first, third and fifth comma with a point in all lines in my data-files? I would prefer a bash script (.sh) or possibly a perl solution

Answer 1

Or how about awk

for F in * ; do awk -F,  'BEGIN { OFS = "," } ; { print $1"."$2, $3"."$4, $5"."$6 } ' $F | sponge $F ; done

You need “moreutils” for sponge, by the way. And back up your files first!