Shell Programming and Scripting

I have a text file that looks like this:

Line1) 2000001 12 34 42.5 122 204 2000001 -2000001 15
Line2) 2000001 14 2000001 38.3 2000001 88 2000001
Line3) 45 2000001 446 2000001 88 2000001
Line4) 2000001 2000001 65 883 2000001 34 2000001 5000 2000001
.
.
.

What I want to do is to scan each line of the file and if there are more than 3 repeats of 2000001 on that specific line (ex. Line2 and Line4), I want to leave that line alone. If there are less than 3 (Line1 and Line3) then I want to replace all the 2000001 values with one 0.

I was wondering if someone could help me with this problem using Perl or at least point me in the right direction. Thanks in advanced!

And what do you want to do if there are exactly 3 occurrences of "2000001" ?

Do you mean all or each ?
That is, for line no. 1 which has 2 occurrences (less than 3):

Code:

Line1) 2000001 12 34 42.5 122 204 2000001 -2000001 15

do you want each occurence to be replaced by a 0 ?

Code:

Line1) 0 12 34 42.5 122 204 0 -2000001 15

If you really mean all, then where should the 0 be placed (since the two occurrences of 2000001 are not consecutive) ?

tyler_durden

If there are 3 occurrences, then I want all 3 of them to be replaced by one 0 and preferably have the 0 at the beginning of the line. If you cannot replace them with a 0, it is also okay to completely remove those values (replace them with nothing).

Code:

$ 
$ cat f1
Line1) 2000001 12 34 42.5 122 204 2000001 -2000001 15
Line2) 2000001 14 2000001 38.3 2000001 88 2000001
Line3) 45 2000001 446 2000001 88 2000001
Line4) 2000001 2000001 65 883 2000001 34 2000001 5000 2000001
$ 
$ 
$ ##
$ perl -lne 'chomp; while(/ 2000001( |$)/g){$i++};
>            if ($i<=3) {s/ 2000001( |$)/$1/g; printf("%d ",0)} print; $i=0' f1
0 Line1) 12 34 42.5 122 204 -2000001 15
Line2) 2000001 14 2000001 38.3 2000001 88 2000001
0 Line3) 45 446 88
Line4) 2000001 2000001 65 883 2000001 34 2000001 5000 2000001
$ 
$

tyler_durden

thanks a lot!

---------- Post updated at 12:41 AM ---------- Previous update was at 12:27 AM ----------

My text file contains hundreds of those kinds of lines, I feel like doing it as you've shown is quite difficult. Is there a way to accommodate this new requirement?

---------- Post updated at 12:53 AM ---------- Previous update was at 12:41 AM ----------

Sorry, I misinterpreted your code, it's fine.

Thanks again!

---------- Post updated at 09:56 PM ---------- Previous update was at 12:53 AM ----------

Could you help me create a perl script for this command? I have many files of this type, each with hundreds of lines and it's quite difficult to run it on the command line. I would really appreciate it if you could help me put it into a script. I would also like to be able to create an output file to store the results. Thanks again!