Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi All,

Consider the file with following lines:

1,2,3,4
1,2,3,
5,6,7,7,8,9
1

[Please note that the actual contents of file have no reln with the query]

I need to get the count of minimum columns per line. i.e. in above case, it should come out to be 1 since the last line only has 1 column.

I tried following code:

Code:

minCount = 0
wordCountPerLine = 0

while true;
do
     read myLine || break
     for (i =0 ; i < NF ; i++)
     do
         $lineCount = $wordCountPerLine +1
     done
     if ($minCount < $wordCountPerLine )
     then
         $minCount = $wordCountPerLine 
     fi
     wordCountPerLine =0
done < [File Name]

Have 2 queries:

1 > Will this work !!!! ???

2 > The reason I myself cannot answer the 1st query is for the following errors:

line 3: minCount : command not found
line 4: wordCountPerLine : command not found
line 22: syntax error near unexpected token `('
line 22: ` for (i =0 ; i < NF ; i++)'

Please help out

You can try awk

Code:

awk -F, 'NF{_=(NF<_||!_)?NF:_}END{print _}' file

Thanks a ton !!! U compressed it incredibly ... But can you please evaluate my code?? And why am I getting simple variable declaration errors?

bash

Code:

IFS="," read -a arr <"file"
t=${#arr[@]}
while IFS="," read -a line
do
  n=${#line[@]}
  [ "$n" -lt "$t" ] && t="$n"  
done < "file"
echo "lowest count: $t"

Thank you sir !!

The value comes out to be zero, so my logic is wrong. Do I have to specify the Field separator as well ???