Shell Programming and Scripting

hey all, does anybody know a good way to count the number of tabs before a word in a line? Or maybe even whitespace, although tabs seem to be what is seperating the word from the beginning of the line?

I have a specific file format I am parsing and trying to find child parent relationships. Ex:

Parent
. .Child
. . .Child
. .Child
etc....

I figure knowing the number of tabs I can test for the relationship. There would be no other words before the names, just tabs/whitepace. If ya have any other ideas on how to do this, that would be awesome.

thanks

Here's something to get you started

Code:

#!/usr/bin/awk -f

BEGIN {
  FS = "\t"
}

{ if ( NF - 1 == 0 ) {
  # Parent
  print "Parent"
} else {
  # Child
  print NF - 1, "tab(s).."
} }

Code:

$ ./awkfile tabfile
Parent
2 tab(s)..
3 tab(s)..
1 tab(s)..
4 tab(s)..
2 tab(s)..

Cheers
ZB

great, I'll give that a try. Thanks!!