Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,

I have a file which consists of two columns but the first one can be varying in length like

Code:

123456789   0abcd
123456789   0abcd
4015        0   0abcd
5000            0abcd

I want to go through the file reading each line, count the number of characters in the first column and delete the whole row if the value is lesser than or greater than 9. For.eg. in the above example I want the last two lines to be deleted and should look like

Code:

123456789   0abcd
123456789   0abcd

Please advise. Many thanks

Hi, try:

Code:

awk 'length($1)==9' infile

I wanted the differing rows in a separate file so was able to extract these by using:

Code:

awk '{if (length($1)!=9) print $0}' infile > abcd

but the original file has remained as is. Is there a way to do this in a single step instead of repeating the awk code?

Thanks