[SGVLUG] Shell fun: cutting the last field of a record...

[Emerson, Tom]

I've got a file delimited with vertical-bar characters (|)

The last field of each record is a filename, and there is no trailing
"|" in the record.

I've got a process that is extracting the name as follows:

   for REC in `cat worklist`
   do
      fname=`echo $REC | cut -f6 -d"|"`
      <does something thaqt creates the file "$fname">
   done

Say for instance the file "worklist" looks like this:

   rec1|field2|field3|field4|field5|filea
   rec2|field2|field3|field4|field5|fileb
   rec3|field2|field3|field4|field5|filec^M  (file has an embedded
carraige return at the end)

When I'm done, a listing of the directory with "-b" (show embedded
specials as \octal) shows that the carraige return ended up as part of
the filename:

   filea
   fileb
   filec\015

how can I eliminate that trailing "/r" ?  (and before you ask, the
workfile is being generated by a database extract of fields that were
populated by a [visual] spreadsheet-style database query tool, so
inadvertantly pressing <enter> during data entry could easily go
unnoticed)