Shell Programming and Scripting

I have no idea how long it will take. As I said before, I don't have any idea whether it will even complete successfully. Try it and see what happens. If you run out of memory, hit argument limits, hit line length limits, etc. you can let us know exactly what errors are reported and we may then be able to help split up the calls to awk into chunk sizes that will work for your environment. Then we can use paste to join the chunks together.

I would suggest trying it with just b.? (instead of b.? b.?? b.??? and b.????) as a test to see that you're getting what you want and to get a an extremely rough estimate of how long it will take to process an input file. (However, each file processed will probably tale longer than the last file before it.)

hi,
it did not take up to 5 minutes. It seems to give me what I want but I would have to check to make sure.
Thanks

---------- Post updated at 08:06 AM ---------- Previous update was at 08:04 AM ----------

I had to do a little adjustment to b.?, I used b* instead because it could not read the first one

I am not sure what you want..

as per my understanding you want your output file as per the list file.

have you tried with join..?

try this..

Code:

cat list > Final_out
for i in b.*
do
join Final_out $i > temp_file
mv temp_file Final_out    
done

Hi iconig,
In your first message on this thread, you said:

Code:

Each of these files is named this way b.4, b.5, b.6, b.7, b.8, b.9, b.10, b.11, b.12 .......b.3000

If that statement was true, then b.? would match files b.4 through b.9. If you use:

Code:

list b.* b.?? b.??? b.????

instead of:

Code:

list b.? b.?? b.??? b.????

you will include output from files b.10, b.11, b.12 ... b.3000 in your output twice. If you use:

Code:

list b.*

instead of:

Code:

list b.? b.?? b.??? b.????

you'll get each file once, but the 1st few columns in the output will be from files list, b.10, b.100, b.1000, b.1001, and b.1002 instead of from files list, b.4, b.5, b.6, and b.7.

If you use list b* instead of list b.* and you have other files with first character "b" and a 2nd character that is not ".", you may also get output from some of them throwing off columns in some rows if they are not in the same format as the format you specified for the b.* files.