Delimited File Help

garpal · #1 (**permalink**) 03-27-2008

Hey guys I am new to unix programming and need some help with a task.

I have a file that is comma delimited with values like this

1,NEW.txt
1,OLD.txt
2,MONKEY.txt
3,FUN.txt
100,MONEY.txt

I have a user enter a value for the type they want (1,2,3,100).

I then want to compare the first column in the file to that entered value and return the second column in that file if it matches.

If 1 is entered I want returned:

NEW.txt
OLD.txt

I cannot figure out how to use awk, cut or sed to do this.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance folks!

rubin · #2 (**permalink**) 03-27-2008

One way of doing it:

script

Code:

#!/bin/bash
filename="$1"
echo "Enter value "
read value

awk -F, -v var="$value"  '{if (var == $1 ) print $2}'  "$filename"

It should be run as :

Code:

./script your_file

garpal · #3 (**permalink**) 03-28-2008

Rubin... I am getting an error on the code given. I hardcoded some test data and tried to run.

Code:

awk -F, -v var="1"  '{if (var == $1 ) print $2}'  GO_FILE_LIST.dat   

awk: syntax error near line 1
awk: bailing out near line 1

era · #4 (**permalink**) 03-28-2008

Works here. Do you have a really old version of awk? The script itself is so trivial as to hardly contain any syntax at all -- does your awk understand -F and -v? If not, do you have access to nawk, or mawk, or gawk, ... or (gasp) Perl? (Hint: a2p)

garpal · #5 (**permalink**) 03-28-2008

Thats a very good question, I have no idea what version of awk I have...

I have access to nawk but not the other two. And I do have access to Perl but know nothing about it.

This ended up working for me... Can you see any issues with this?

Code:

$VAR_NAM=$1
$FILE_LIST=$2
$TEMP_FILE=$3

awk -F, '$1=='"$VAR_NAM"' {print $2}'  $FILE_LIST > $TEMP_FILE

Thanks for the help!

Update...
Using nawk the previous code worked fine with the IF statements thanks for the help folks!

era · #6 (**permalink**) 03-28-2008

Strictly speaking, you should put double quotes around the file names too. And obviously, when assigning to a variable, you don't put a dollar sign in front of the variable name. Other than that, schoolbook example -- good work.

Would still be interesting to learn if switching from awk to nawk would solve the problem you were having with the syntax error.

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