how to truncate lines in a text file

I have a text file and I would like to truncate every line down to about 16 characters....

Anyone know how to do this on linux?

thanks

 

You could use a PHP script. Something like this - if you wanted to write the out put to a file - that could be done with file_put_contents.

<?php

$file = file_get_contents("comma.txt");
$file = explode("\n",$file);

foreach ($file as $line){

	$first_sixteen .=  substr($line,0,16) ."\n";

}

echo $first_sixteen;

?>

PHP:

 

PHP? I could replace your script with a few chars... and I could problably replace you with a very short shell script, just joking :^)

You can use sed or awk, which would be very simple, but in this case make use of cut (or even tr).
cut (1) - remove sections from each line of files
tr (1) - translate or delete characters

Just read the manual for cut...

 

Thanks guys

thats php script is very useful, especially for someone withour shell access

I found the answer:

cut -c1-16 /path/to/filename > /path/to/output_filename