Question

Possible Duplicate:
Truncate stdin line length?

I have been looking for an awk or perl (or maybe sed?) one-liner to print the first 80 char in a line to be used in as:

cat myfile.txt | # awk/perl here

I’m guessing something like perl -pe 'print $_[0..80]' should work but I’m no good in perl.

EDIT perl -pe 'print $_[0..80] does not work and I don’t know why. That’s why I asked this question. I feel like explaining after all those silent downvotes..

Also cat myfile.txt is just to demonstrate that the command should be in a pipe, I’m actually using some other output.

Answer 1

cut:

cut -c1-80 your_file

awk:

awk '{print substr($0,0,80)}' your_file

sed:

sed -e 's/^\(.\{80\}\).*/\1/' your_file

perl:

perl -lne 'print substr($_,0,80)' your_file

or:

perl -lpe 's/.{80}\K.*//s' your_file

grep:

grep -o "^.\{80\}" your_file