Shell Programming and Scripting

in my file which is a rather long log file it contains many text and tables and there is one table with 15 columns and I am interested to read in the value in column6 and its corresponding value in column2. Trouble is I do not know how to script it as the line number various between different log file and column 1 is different in all the lines within that table so there is nothing to match. Can anyone tell me how I could write this script?

I don't think you are gonna get some assistance unless you post a representative sample content of your file and desired output.

ok if in my log file

there is a table somewhere in that file (amongst plenty other text and tables) that begins like

Code:

Table title
==========
line of text

line of text

line of text
$$
column1 column2 column3 column4 column5 column6 etc etc etc
1
2
3
4
.
.
.
.
etc

I want to write a script that if the value on column 6 is greater than say, 2, then return the corresponding value on column 2 on the same line.

I hope that makes it clear.

Basically

Code:

awk '$6>2{print $2}' yourfile

May need some tweak depending on the formatting of yourfile

that wont work as I mentioned earlier the file contained plenty other text and other tables so that command will return plenty of junks as well.

Is there a way to specify only "awk"-ing that specific table?

You can do almost anything with awk. But unless you post your data here, it will be only guessing from us. So post real data, and what you like the output to be.

The only other information I can extract from your vague (if not worse) specification is the table has 15 columns. If that is enough to tell junk from valuable input, extend ctsgnb's proposal:

Code:

awk 'NF == 15 && $6>2 {print $2}' yourfile

If that does not solve your problem, be far more specific!