Okay folks, here's a question. I tried searching but couldn't find exactly what I needed.

I have a text file (excerpt below). This text file is an extract I did from several hundred pages of datasheets using grep so I could look only at the site history for each site. The problem is that there is a single row for EACH site visit. I want to condense this list so that there is one line per site, and multiple instances (columns) of "site visits" for each site.

There are a total of 47 unique site names, and each site has between 3 and 13 instances of "history" (i.e. the number of times the site has been visited), and each "history has 3 items ("date," "condition," and "report by")

So I'd go from this:

HS1415  HISTORY     - Date     Condition        Report By
HS1415  HISTORY     - 1972     MONUMENTED       CADH
HS1415  HISTORY     - 1972     GOOD             NGS
HS1415  HISTORY     - 20040519 GOOD             CADT
HS1415  HISTORY     - 20110214 MARK_NOT_FOUND   BOR
HS1412  HISTORY     - Date     Condition        Report By
HS1412  HISTORY     - 1972     MONUMENTED       CADH
HS1412  HISTORY     - 1972     GOOD             NGS
HS1412  HISTORY     - 19881117 GOOD             NGS
HS1412  HISTORY     - 20040519 GOOD             CADT
HS1412  HISTORY     - 20110928 GOOD             ATKNA

HS1415 HISTORY     - Date     Condition        Report By HISTORY     - 1972     MONUMENTED       CADH HISTORY     - 1972     GOOD             NGS (etc...)
HS1412 HISTORY     - Date     Condition        Report By HISTORY     - 1972     MONUMENTED       CADH HISTORY     - 1972     GOOD             NGS (etc...)
(etc...)

You could do something like:

awk '
oldone && $1!=oldone {
   printf ("\n")
}
{
  printf ("%s", $0);
  oldone=$1;
}
END {
  printf ("\n");
}' inputfile

AWESOME!!

Thanks so much, that's exactly what I needed.