Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi all,

I am wondering if its possible to solve my problem with a simple code.

Basically I have a file that looks like this (tab delimited)

bob 8 250 tina 8 225
sam 8 225 ellen 9 315
kyle 9 275 sally 9 135

So what I want to do is match columns 2 and 5. If columns 2 and 5 match, the next thing would be to determine the shortest distance between column 3 and 6. Basically I want it to print the columns with the shortest distance.

So from the above, it will print:
bob 8 250 tina 8 225 25
kyle 9 275 ellen 9 315 40

thanks

-----Post Update-----

awk -F"\t" '$2==$5 {print $0}' filename


this is what I have so far. This could only match columns but does not do the subtraction and finding the shortest distance. I guess this is where im stuck

Code:

awk -F"\t" '$2==$5 {print $0, $3 - $6}' filename

another perl code:

Code:

while(<DATA>){
	chomp;
	my @tmp=split;
	print $_," ",$tmp[2]-$tmp[5],"\n" if $tmp[1]==$tmp[4];
}
__DATA__
bob 8 250 tina 8 225
sam 8 225 ellen 9 315
kyle 9 275 sally 9 135