Hi,

I am new to unix and I need help in solving below mentioned issue, really appreciate ur help.

I have a file

sam, john, 2324, 07142007
tom, thomson, 2343, 07142007
john, scott, 2478, 07142007

its a comma delimited file, I need to extract the last column from each line and this column is a date field. The date should be unique through out the file, if this column has got more than one value, the script should be exited.

Please help me out.

Thank you

awk -F", " '{ arr[NF]++; for ( i in arr ) { if ( arr[i] > 1 ) { exit;} } }END{ for ( i in arr ) { print i } }' filename

Thankx for the reply,

I tested this with duplicate values and also unique muliple values in the column of the file and its always returning 1

data in the file

,,02132007
,,03132007

script is returning 1

,,02132007
,,02132007

here also its retruning 1

if all the column values return unique value out of all the records then I need that unique value in my logic. if it returns more than one value then it should exit with some exit code.

can you please modify the script, would be real helpful. I am in urgent need of it.

Thanks

with duplicate values

cat file
sam, john, 2324, 07142007
tom, thomson, 2343, 07142007
john, scott, 2478, 07142007

awk -F", " '{ arr[$NF]++; for ( i in arr ) { if ( arr[i] > 1 ) { dup=1; exit} } }END{ if ( dup != 1 ) { for ( i in arr ) { print i } } }' file

cat file
sam, john, 2324, 17142007
tom, thomson, 2343, 27142007
john, scott, 2478, 07142007

07142007
27142007
17142007

another way:

awk -F", " 'arr[$NF] != 0 {exit} { arr[$NF]++ ; cnt++ } END { if ( cnt == NR ){ for ( i in arr ) { print i }}}' filename