Shell Programming and Scripting

Yes, I was able to modify the above code to insert another column in the second position with the header "group" and the value "V".

Code:

awk 'BEGIN { FS = OFS = "\t" } { $1 = $1 OFS (!(NR-1)?"group":"V") } 1' temp_output1 > temp_output2

Though I was able to modify the script to get what I needed, I still don't fully understand the syntax.

As far as I can tell,
{ FS = OFS = "\t" } means that the input and output field separators are both tab.

{ $1 = $1 OFS (!(NR-1)?"group":"V") } appears to concatenate field 1, plus the output separator, plus "group" for the first record (or V if it is not the first record) and assign that all to field 1. This effectively makes $1 two fields wide with the original column 1 plus the new column. I have tried to reference !(NR-1)? but since google now seems to think it knows better than you what it should show you from a search, searching on "!(NR-1)?" in quotes returns no results that actually have that string. I really miss the "+" in google search.

I don't see where the rest of the fields are printed out, unless the trailing 1 does that.

Do I have this correct, more or less?

LMHmedchem

Yes, awk sees the (not necessarily trailing) 1 as a "pattern" (a logic expression) that always is TRUE, and with an "action" missing it performs the default action which is "print".

NR is an awk internal variable counting input lines starting from 1, so (NR-1) starts from 0, which is equivalent to FALSE. So !(NR-1) is TRUE only for the first input line. The question mark (?) following is part of a "conditional operator" that assigns either of two values depending on a boolean decision.