Shell Programming and Scripting

Just change to

Code:

push @{$seen{"@F[3..16]"}}, $F[0];

It changes spaces to one. If you want to save them you need use substr() on $_. If you want another output separator then change it in END block before any print like this: $\="\t"

"-a" switch splits every input line to @F array. Then we push in an anonymous array the first field and this array is in the hash "seen", where the key is the joined array slice. In the END block we for every unique key counts how many time fields there is, how seconds total between them and evaluate average.

---

Sorry, I'm wrong about the output separator. If you want change it, you need change in BEGIN block $" variable.

Code:

perl -ane '
  BEGIN {
    $"="\t";
  }
  push @{$seen{"@F[3..16]"}}, $F[0];
  END {
    for $key (sort keys %seen) {
        @ts = @{$seen{$key}};
        $n = @ts;
        $prev = $ts[0];
        $nt = 0;
        print "$key $n ";
      for $time (@ts) {
        $nt += $time - $prev;
      }
      print $nt/$n, "\n";
    }
}' INPUTFILE

There is another small problem I found. The record it keeps is static, meaning it should count the seconds since the last appearance, but what it's doing right now is counting the seconds since the FIRST appearance every time. In your example, this makes the seconds since the first 'a' be 2, then 5, then 6 which gives an average of 3.25 and the real average should be made between 2, 3 and 1 (which would give a 1.5 avg).

Change to:

Code:

      for $time (@ts) {
        $nt += $time - $prev;
        $prev = $time;
      }

Thanks for all your help yazu!!

Is it possible to do it the other way (keep track of the number of lines between repetitions and then make an avg)?

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I guess I only have to replace the timestamps with the current input line number in the code, in order to get the average lines

So then it becomes:

Code:

push @{$seen{"@F[3..16]"}}, $.;

Or so I think!