Shell Programming and Scripting

I have requirement where I need to capture the highest values of
items from a feed that runs for N hours.

For example lets assume my data looks like this

first feed
========
appples 10
oranges 20
pears 14

second feed
==========
apples 5
oranges 30
pears 1

Last feed
=======
apples 6
oranges 1
pears 4

At the end of my script this would be my output

apples 10
oranges 30
pears 14

I know I can write this all out to a file and than sort the file and look
for the highest values that way but I was wondering if this can be done
with an 2 dimensioal array if ksh supports it or with a more elegant
solution as writing all this data to a file may file up my file system.

my code would need to look something like this

Code:

 
while [ now -lt done_time]
do
   get_fruit | read data 
   eval $data
 
   keep the highest value for each fruit       
done
 
print out each fruit and the highest values

My solution does not need to be an array but I am really trying to
avoid writing data to files if possible until the very end...

Thanks for any suggestions

ksh has better than 2d arrays, it has associative arrays. You can do ARR["apples"]=30

We detail on how this "fruit-daemon" provides its information to show you how to use that information, naturally.

Thanks thats exactly what I was looking for. I will search how to set the values dynamucally

Code:

$ nawk '{print $0 > $1".txt"}' feed*

The above command will create three .txt files ( apples.txt, orange.txt, pears.txt )

Code:

$ for i in *.txt; do sort -n -r -k2 $i | head -1; done
apples 10
oranges 30
pears 14

How to set the values is easy. ARR[$VAR]=$VALUE

How you get the data depends entirely on what you're doing.

It appears that assoc arrarys are not supported on AIX 6.1.. Thanks for
your help. It's a good feature

For the fourth time, where to go from here depends on how your data's retrieved.

How's it retrieved?