Hello,

I have a file which contains groups of fields. These groups are separated by a blank line, to form a logical record.

Each line consists of a field-value pair.

If want to find all records where field 'd' has a value of '4' and if it does, I want the value of field 'a' (from the same record).

Here's an example input file:

Quote:

a 1 b 2 c 3 d 4 a 2 b 1 d 6 b 3 a 6 c 2 c 2 d 4 a 9 c 3 d 4 a 3 d 4 a 6

I want to end up with a file containing:

Quote:

1 6

Import things to nore about the input file are a) the number of records varies, b) not all records contain a 'd' field, c) not all records contain a 'a' field, e) fields can be in any order within a record.

I think the answer will be to use AWK but I have very little knowledge of AWK and have only used it for very basic things.

The OS is Sun 5.8 by the way.

Help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.