Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi all,

I have a file with several columns of data, eg:

A B C D

1 2 5 1
2 2 2 2
8 4 4 4
4 2 3 4
10 9 4 4
9 7 1 2

I need to get the values from, say, column B and place them into a string separated by a semicolon, eg:

2;2;4;2;9;7

Does anyone have any ideas how to do this? Any help would be massively appreciated! Thanks.

Pherhaps this script can help you:

#!/bin/ksh

for row in `tail +3 your_file | awk '{print $2}'`
do
echo "$row;\c" >your_new_file
done

That almost works, but it needs a couple corrections..

Replace > with >>, so that new information is added on to the end of your_new_file and doesn't overwrite what's already there.

Replace `tail +3 your_file | awk '{print $2}'` with `awk '{print $2}' file` so that all the numbers in the row are extracted from your_file.

-----
Oh wait, now I see why you put the tail command in.. guess it depends if A B C D is actually in the file or not..

Cheers guys, works great, you've been a big help!

Alternatively, you can use:

someVar=`awk '{ printf $2 ";" }' file`

if A B C D is not at the top of the file to produce output like this:

2;2;4;2;9;7;