How to read and compare multiple fields in a column at the same time

ahjiefreak · #1 (**permalink**) 06-19-2008

Hi,

Currently I am coding up a nasty way of reading file input using *cat* rather than *read*. My text input looks like

TextA 100
TextB 110
TextC 120

Currently I am using cat |while read line to read the first column and second column fields.

cat foo.txt|while read line
do

myfirstcol=`echo "${LINE}"| awk '{print $1}'`

mysecondcol=`echo "${LINE}"|awk '{print $2}'`

However, I would like to implement more intelligent code where there can be more than one cases in the second field.

TextA 100,101
TextB 110,143,155,160
TextC 120,200

and from reading the possiblities of second column, i wanted to choose the smallest grep value.

e.g
mysecondcol=`echo "${LINE}"|awk '{print $2}'`

#return the position
grep -n mysecondcol$ fileA.txt

Basically if by grabbing 100 return position 30 from grep,
and grabbing 101 return position 1 from grep., it would choose the
smallest which is 101 (since it return 1).

I am not too sure how can i implement the above logic by using *read data*

Please advise. Thanks.

jim mcnamara · #2 (**permalink**) 06-19-2008

Code:

while read record 
do
     set -A recarray $( echo "$record" | tr -s ',' ' ')
# at this point you now have an array - ${recarray[0]} is column 1, the rest of the
# elements came from column 2
done < inputfile

in bash: declare -a recarray

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