I have a text file that has some lines like this (hyphen repeated)
-------------------------------------------------------
I need to replace these lines with character 'B' repeated 1500 times. For example, like
BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB
Any suggestions using 'sed' or 'awk' command?
With awk:
$ awk '/^-+$/ {s = sprintf("% 1500s", ""); gsub(/ /,"B",s); print s; next} 1' file
Or, maybe a bit more efficient if you have many such lines:
$ awk 'BEGIN {s = sprintf("% 1500s", ""); gsub(/ /,"B",s)} \
/^-+$/ {print s; next} 1' file
I think
perl -pe 'my $bb = "B"x1500; s/^-+$/$bb/g'
should do it.
printf+sed variant:
$ cat file
1111
----
2222
$ sed -r 's/^-+$/'"$(printf -- "%.1s" B{1..150})/" file
1111
BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB
2222
Here sed is used only for replacement.
printf is used for generating 1500 times B. (The above scriptlet has 150 instead of 1500, because it required too much scrolling.)