Csv file handling with shell script

In this post, we are going to take a look on basic csv operations which includes read, write, find etc.

so let’s get started with this.

Make sure, you have csv file with you in folder, you can refer to file handing post to learn more about it.

Create a file using editor of your choice, I am using vi editor for this

vi csvOperations.sh

This will create a file and open editor

###Common declaration first declare shebang as below

#!/bin/bash

then create variable which will hold csv file name

csvFile="data.csv"

Let’s create a functions for basic operations

Function to read CSV file

readCsv()
{
        echo "Content in csv file as below"
        cat $csvFile
}

function count rows in file

We are going to use tail function with wc | -l options which can give us count of rows in file

countRows()
{
        echo "Number of rows in file: "
        tail data.csv | wc -l
}

Extract specific column values

We can use awk function to get column values

extractColumns(){
        echo "extracting second column"
        awk -F , '{print $2}' "$csvFile"
}

where:

-F , –> this will use as field seperator to comma , meaning awk will treat each comma-seperated value as different column

{print $2} –> this will tell awk command to print second column

$csvFile –> we are passing csv file to awk command for processing

Append data to csv file

We are going to ask user to enter value to append data to csv

appendData()
{
        echo "Enter below information to add new row to csv"
        read -p "Enter Id:" id
        read -p "Enter Name:" name
        read -p "Enter Dept:" dept

        echo "$id, $name, $dept" >> "$csvFile"
        echo " data added to csv file"
}

Get row by Id

We are going to ask user to enter row id which he wants to search for , We can get row by passing Id using awk command

getRowById()
{
        read -p "Enter Id of row you want to read" rowId
        awk -F , -v id="$rowId" '$1==id' "$csvFile"
}

Where:

-F , –> this will use as field seperator to comma , meaning awk will treat each comma-seperated value as different column

-v id="$rowId" –> this will define variable id inside awk command and assign value of rowId which passed by user

'$1==id' –> as we have stored Ids in first column in csv file, this will check if first column matched id from csv file

Function calling

Now, its time to call functions one by one.

readCsv
countRows
extractColumns
appendData
echo "Read Csv again after adding new row"
readCsv
getRowById

That’s it, lets save this file , grant required permission. Before run this, lets take a look on our data.csv file

id,name,dept
1,abc,IT
2,pqr,HR
3,xyz,Acc

Now, run our executable csv opeations file