UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

The output file was not included in my instructions, for the reason that it would be empty. It doesn't use it.

Check for the files 'M' and 'F' in the same directory, they will not be empty.

When I run the program I had M, F file but there is just one line.
What I have in my data set is more lines than the example. I have 2600 lines which contains M and F which are genders. What I want is how to separate 2 files from the data set in 2 file that have separate gender M and gender F.

That is what my example does, yes. It writes to different file names depending on what the value of the fourth column is.

If the fourth column isn't what you showed it to be in your example data, it won't do what I expect. Check the contents of your folder with 'ls', it may have made weird names.

Could you show a more complete example of your input data please?

you can find my data set which I want to subset base on gender M and F in 2 separate file.

The data you posted clearly shows M/F in the fifth column, not the fourth.

Also, the data you posted has no header row, which your original data did. I can simplify my code a lot knowing it's not there.

Code:

awk '{ print > $5 }' inputfile

This is really bad, but seems to work.
Making the assumption that M or F will only appear once on each line
and separated by white space.

Code:

while read line
	do
	    if [[ $line == *M* ]]; then  
	    echo "$line"
	    ## cat to file	
	    fi
	    if [[ $line == *F* ]]; then
	    echo "$line"
	    ## cat to file
	    fi
	done < file

The solution works

---------- Post updated at 11:57 AM ---------- Previous update was at 11:52 AM ----------

Code:

grep M aa.txt > M
grep F aa.txt > F

This will get you what you need