topic Re: awk in Operating System - HP-UX

awk

Karen Hall — Wed, 16 Oct 2002 18:50:07 GMT

I have a file consisting of two columns separated by a space. I can assign a variable name to one column by doing:

for i in `awk '{print $1} ' basefile`

But how do I assign a variable name to the column 2 value?

basefile
--------
john nancy
gene esther
mike ruth

Re: awk

John Poff — Wed, 16 Oct 2002 18:57:24 GMT

Hi,

Use the $2 parameter for the value in the second column. To loop on the values of the second column try this:

for i in `awk '{print $2}' basefile`

I'm just curious. What are you trying to do with it anyway?

JP

P.S. Get ready for the Perl wizards to descend on you! ;)

Re: awk

A. Clay Stephenson — Wed, 16 Oct 2002 19:00:51 GMT

It's really pretty easy:

Because the entries are whitespace separated you really don't even need awk.

cat basefile | while read A B
do
echo "1st var = ${A} 2nd var = ${B}"
done

Re: awk

MANOJ SRIVASTAVA — Wed, 16 Oct 2002 19:03:30 GMT

cat basefile | awk '{print $1}' > abc
cat basefile | awk '{print $2}' >> abc

for i in 'awk {print $1 }' `abc`

Manoj Srivastava

Re: awk

Karen Hall — Wed, 16 Oct 2002 19:23:52 GMT

A.Clay, you're right! That works great. Sometimes you can't see the forest for the trees. Thanks!

Re: awk

Fred Martin_1 — Thu, 17 Oct 2002 12:07:37 GMT

As an aside, I strongly recommend you get a copy of the paperback "The AWK Programming Language" by Aho, Weinberger, Kernighan (AWK's developers).

It's the most concise yet complete manual for anything I've ever seen, and covers AWK very simply.