Issue with negative sign after executing the tr command in UNIX

Question

My requirement is to convert pipe separated file into normal excel. So I used the below tr command in UNIX to perform this operation. tr \'|\' \',\' < filename.csv > file

Answer 1

Instead of tr, you can just use awk to over-write the Output-Field-Separator which in your case is |

awk '{$1=$1}1' FS="|" OFS=" " filename.csv > filename_Final.csv

The above command over-writes the OFS to a single white-space, hence your input file

1|abc|-123
2|def|456
3|ijk|789

gets converted to

1 abc -123
2 def 456
3 ijk 789

thereby without disturbing the column entries present.