The difference between now and then is that I need it to be a bash/bourne script. The previous thread was for a awk-program. But I had to change it to be a bash/bourne shell script. To be honest, I don't know the difference really, but I got some uggly looks from my friend when I showed him the awk-program that some of you helped me with. So I turned back to bourne/bash.

So my script so far is:

cat $1 | grep "results" | grep "get numbers" | xargs -n $2

It is somewhat more advanced then the command above, but this is only so you get the whole picture. It produces columns with values from files named $1 and the numbers of columns are determined by $2.

Now, since $2 is a variable I don't know how many columns there is going to be. It is not going to be many, lets say around 2-10 should suffice. I need, as I previous stated go through each column adding them and then dividing them with the number of elements in each column. So if the output from the following command above is:

1 4
2 5
3 6
4 7
5 8

The result should be:

3 6

Which is the average of each of the columns.

I've done something like this, but it doesn't seem to work,

while [ $j > 0 ]
do
cat list | awk '{sum+=$i} END {print sum/NR}'
i=$[$i+1]
j=$[$j-1]
done

awk seems to have problem with $i. But I need this to be a variable but awk says:

awk: illegal field $(), name "i"
input record number 1, file
source line number 1