Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi Folks -

I'm quite new to awk and didn't come across such issues before. The problem statement is that, I've a file with duplicate records in 3rd and 4th fields. The sample is as below:

Code:

aaaaaa|a12|45|56
abbbbaaa|a12|45|56
bbaabb|b1|51|45
bbbbbabbb|b2|51|45
aaabbbaaaa|a11|45|56

Here,the combination of field3 and field is same for few records viz. 4556 for the first 2 and last rows and so on..

Now,the output file is expected to be like this:

Code:

aaabbbaaaa|a11|45|56
bbbbbabbb|b2|51|45

That is, checking the length of first field for the rows where field3&field4 match and return the row with highest length in first field among them. So, one row will be picked from each set of duplicates based on the length on first field

Could you please help with a one line awk command to achieve this?

Moderator's Comments:

Video tutorial on how to use code tags in The UNIX and Linux Forums.

Try:

Code:

awk -F"|" 'length($1)>l[$3"|"$4]{l[$3"|"$4]=length($1);a[$3"|"$4]=$0}END{for (i in a) print a[i]}' file

Code:

awk -F\| 'END { 
 for (R in r)
   print r[R]
 }
length($1) > l[$3, $4] {  
  l[$3, $4] = length($1)
  r[$3, $4] = $0
  }' infile

Hi Bartus....Thanks a lot...your solution worked out