Shell Programming and Scripting

thanx alot its working l

This command will give you the tab output:

sed 's/\.\.\./,/g' input file|awk -F"," 'OFS="\t" {if($2 > $1) {print $2,$1} else {print $1,$2}}'

or

if you are using input file with delimeter tab..then use below one:
awk -F"\t" 'OFS="\t" {if($2 > $1) {print $2,$1} else {print $1,$2}}' inputfile

Thanks
Sha

Hi all, how can I modify the last solution (that awk's a tab delimited file) in order to do the following:

file.tab contains 5 fields:

1 1 text1
2 1 text1
3 1 text1
3 2 text2
3 3 text2
4 1 text1

I would like to merge $3 whenever subindex $2 is larger than 1.
The goal is to output only one line for each unique index $1:

1 1 text1
2 1 text1
3 1 text1,text2,text2
4 1 text1

And only unique lines should be added

1 1 text1
2 1 text1
3 1 text1,text2
4 1 text1

Thanks in advance!

-Per

if i understand your question correctly it's very easy
make the first column as one file
sort -u file1 --command to srt the file
make other columns as one file sort -u file2 ---sort the file using the same command
join file1 file2 ---this command joins the unique lines in a same line