Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi folks,

I have a file with four columns that looks like the following (tab separated)
1 1 1 a
2 2 2 b
3 3 3 c
4 4 4 d

I would like to create a file with always 4 columns but where the third entry corresponds to the thirst entry of the next line and so on, to get the following
1 1 2 a
2 2 3 b
3 3 4 c
...

any hint on how to deal with that using awk ?

Many thanks,

Hi klebsiella,

How would be output of last line?

Hi birei,

Thanks for the fast reply,

In that case we have to forget the last line. I only pick the value of the third column from it.

Code:

$ awk 'NR>1{print a,b,$3,d}{a=$1;b=$2;d=$4}' file
1 1 2 a
2 2 3 b
3 3 4 c

Hi neutronscott,

This does exactly what I want,

I initially went for more complicated stuf with "getline" and so on.

Cheers