awk

[Karen Hall]

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

[John Poff]

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! ;)

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

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

[MANOJ SRIVASTAVA]

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

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




Manoj Srivastava

[Karen Hall]

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

[Fred Martin_1]

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.