Hi.
I have a script wich reads 1 file and generates 4. If the original file has 10 lines the the sum of the 4 generated files must have the 10 original lines. So far this works.

Now what I need is to numerate the lines wtithin each generated file.
I tried with NR but it prints the line number of the original file, and I need each file to start from 1.

Example:
Original: 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9
using NR Gen_1: 2,5,8,9
Gen_2: 1,3,4,6,7

and what I need is:
Original: 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9
Gen_1: 1,2,3,4
Gen_2: 1,2,3,4,5

any ideas?

thanks in advance.

After you have created your 4 files, you could do something like

awk "{print NR,$0}" file1 > file1_with_line_numbers
awk "{print NR,$0}" file2 > file2_with_line_numbers
awk "{print NR,$0}" file3 > file3_with_line_numbers
awk "{print NR,$0}" file4 > file5_with_line_numbers

Yes, that could work.
However the whole idea of the script is to read the source file and write the generated files only once.
Thanks for the idea, but given the size of the files to process, the line number should be writen with the rest of the line, so the file only gets processed once.