Shell Programming and Scripting

I have a data file with 4 columns, of the format:

Code:

A1 A2 A3 A4
B1 B2 B3 B4
C1 C2 C3 C4
etc..

I would like to insert to put column 2,3,4 on a new line so my new format would be:

Code:

A1
A2 A3 A4
B1
B2 B3 B4
C1
C2 C3 C4 
etc.

but am new at using AWK and am not sure how to do it.

Thanks.

Hi,

Code:

 awk '{print $1"\n"$2,$3,$4}' file

Thanks for the quick reply - I didn't know you needed quote marks around the \n . That's why it didn't work for me.

---------- Post updated at 12:51 PM ---------- Previous update was at 12:30 PM ----------

Is it also possible to modify my output date file so it also contains the initial row numbers of the data lines
e.g. the original data file goes to-->

A1 1
A2 A3 A4
B1 2
B2 B3 B4
C1 3
C2 C3 C4

etc.

Thanks.

This should do the trick

Code:

awk '{print $1,NR "\n" $2,$3,$4}' file

Code:

awk '{print $1" "NR"\n"$2,$3,$4}' urfile

Thanks for that.

I've got one final question. Now that I've got the data in the format above I want to search the file for certain strings (These will always be in the *1 field) and then add a number to the end of that line based on the string.
i.e the output file will now look like

A1 1 x
A2 A3 A4
B1 2 y
B2 B3 B4
C1 3 z
C2 C3 C4

where x,y,z are based on the values A1, B1, C1 respectively (A1,B1,C1 are all letters and are the only letters that appear in the file - the rest are numbers). I don't need anything complicated that will take values from a lookup table or anything like that. Just a statement that I can change the individual parameters on.