UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hello,

I have 50 text files in a directory called "AllFiles"

I want to make a program that will go inside of the "AllFiles" Directory and count the number of lines in each individual text file. Then, the program will calculate how many more lines there are over 400 in each text file and append this information to the beginning of each text file.

For example, lets say i have 5 files in a directory in the "AllFiles" directory:

file1.txt ---has 500 lines
file2.txt ---has 600 lines
file3.txt ---has 550 lines
file4.txt ---has 700 lines
file5.txt ---has 480 lines


The result of the program should be this:

The first line of file1.txt should read: "there are 400 lines in this file and 100 bonus lines"
The first line of file2.txt should read: "there are 400 lines in this file and 200 bonus lines"
The first line of file3.txt should read: "there are 400 lines in this file and 150 bonus lines"
The first line of file4.txt should read: "there are 400 lines in this file and 300 bonus lines"
The first line of file5.txt should read: "there are 400 lines in this file and 80 bonus lines"

Is there any way that i can do this using the command prompt?

I have tried using 'sed' to do this, but i guess i am missing several necessary libraries. I have GNUwin32. I downloaded the program from gnuwin32DOTsourceforgeDOTnet/packages/sedDOThtm. I downloaded and installed the "completed package, except resources" file and "resources" file.

But, i really have no idea how to use sed. I have tried a couple command prompt line items, but most of them end up in errors.

I don't have visual studio, but i do have the Microsoft office Visual Basic editor, and i have tried a few basic things to do this with no success.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

If it matters, my computers operating system is Windows 7.

Since you add 1 line to each and every file, your statement :

Code:

"there are 400 lines in this file and 100 bonus lines"
...

should be :

Code:

"there are 400 lines in this file and 101 bonus lines"
...

Hello, motoxeryz125:

You say you've tried a few commands but they failed with errors. It would be helpful to see the commands/code and the errors.

When you say that you're missing libraries, do you mean that the sed executable is missing libraries that it requires to work at all? If so, before the file processing can be done, you need to first install unix tools that work (cygwin perhaps?) or use a windows native alternative. For the latter, you may have Powershell available. If not, it should be a simple download and double-click to install. There's also the command.exe batch language and the windows/dos utilities, but I am not at all familiar with how/if they would work for this case.

Regards and welcome to the forum,
Alister

Code:

::==countAppend.bat
::@echo off
for %%a in (*.txt) do call :output "%%a"
del count_tmpfile
goto :EOF

:output
set linesmin=3
findstr /R /N "^" %1 | find /C ":" > count_tmpfile
set /p count= < count_tmpfile
set /A bonus= count - linesmin
echo There are %count% lines in this file and %bonus% bonus lines. > tmp_%1
type %1 >> tmp_%1
move /Y  tmp_%1 %1

Hi Motoxeryz125, i think, the above achieves your requirement.. where you have to change linesmin from 3 to 400 to count the bonus lines..

For a UNIX system, I like:

Code:

for f in *; do
        l=$(wc -l < "$f")
        [ $l -lt 400 ] && continue
        ed -s "$f" <<-EOED
                0a
                there are 400 lines in this file and $((l-400)) bonus lines
                .
                w
                q
        EOED
done

Caveat: All the leading whitespace from "<<-EOED" to "EOED" must be tab characters, not spaces.

Regards,
Alister

Hello,

@ctsgnb: I wanted the program to count the number of lines in the original file, then, append the number of lines in the original file to the top of the new text file.

So, if the original file had 600 lines, the first line of the new file would say "there are 400 lines plus 200 bonus lines"

even though the new file would actually have 601 lines.

@Ilan and alister: Thank you for your ideas. I will implement them and let you know my results.

Thanks everyone, for your help and responses

INSERTING LINES WITHIN SCRIPTS

If you want to insert a line at the top (or anywhere) of a file within a shell script, use the ed editor.

Code:

string="hello"
ed << \EOF
e any_file
1i
${string}

Courtesy: http://blogyourfaze.blogspot.com/200...es-within.html