A unix command to truncate each line of a file

Question

I have a CSV file and I want to truncate it from the third semicolon. For example, if I have this file:

1;foo;bar;baz;x;y;z
2;foo;bar;baz;x;y;z
3;foo;bar;baz;x;y;z

I want to get the following output:

1;foo;bar
2;foo;bar
3;foo;bar

I don't know what kind of Unix command I can use for that. What do you suggest?

Note that this manipulation will be done on a KSH script.

Answer 1

For the sake of variety, here's another way with cut:

cut -d \; -f -3

Answer 2

This will accomplish what you ask:

awk -F';' '{print $1 ";" $2 ";" $3;}' <input >output

The awk utility is well designed for this task. It can easily cut up individual lines into fields, then manipulate them based on that. The -F';' argument tells awk to use ; as the field separator. The quotes are necessary because the shell would interpret ; as a command separator without them.

The command given to awk to execute for each line (the '{print $1 ";" $2 ";" $3;}' bit) is similarly quoted to keep all the funny characters ({, }, $, " and ; in this case) from being treated specially by the shell and make sure the whole thing is passed to awk as one unit.

And, of course, <input and >output are the redirection directives being given to the shell to redirect the command's input and output from and to a file.

Answer 3

You can do this using awk, which is not dependent on the shell. You will need to write the output to a temporary file, and then move it on top of the existing one.

awk -F';' 'BEGIN { OFS=";" } { print $1,$2,$3 }' file.txt > newfile.txt
mv newfile.txt file.txt 

Answer 4

Not the greatest alternative, just in case you need in-place editing and wish to solve it with sed:

sed -i ':b;s/;[^;]*//3;tb' file.txt