Shell Programming and Scripting

Awesome! I just had to make one change to get it to work. I changed FNR==1 to NR==1. So I didn't get the header every other line. fAWKing sweet!

OK. I completely misunderstood what you were trying to do. I thought line 1 of EACH input file specified the filename where converted output for that input file was supposed to be written and I assumed you wanted a header in each output file. If you change the FNR==1 to NR==1, then the output file will be determined by the first line of the first file you process and line one in every other input file will be completely ignored (and in this case you don't need to worry about closing output files). Even though your sample input only showed two lines, I'm also surprised that you only have one line of data in each file. That is why my original code had:

Code:

FNR==1 { do stuff for line one in each file;next}
    { do stuff for every line except line one in each file }

Also in your orginal problem statement, your input had five fields; now it has eight. If you have a lot of fields to process at some point you want want to change:

Code:

    {print $1,$2,...,$NF >> outputfile}

to:

Code:

    {$1=$1;print >> outputfile}

I'm glad you got something that is working for you.

More details.. line one of my files contains the same thing.. which represents the filename I'd like to use as my output file. The second line contains statistics on a single channel of data. All of this is because I can't get the software vendor to export the statistics nicely. So the process is to open a file, read the first line, set it as the output variable name, and then process all the files for data on their second line sending all of this data to the same output file. This was my easiest option.. The only other option I have is to process a file that contains all of the data streams in column form. Column 1 would be abscissa data, Column 2 oridinate for channel 2, then ordinate for channel 3, so on and so on.. but when talking time domain data, these files are too large to 1) output and 2) process. When talking frequency domain data, I think it would be easy but I would most likely switch over to Matlab. I wrote an AWK script awhile ago for interactively switching RBE2s to RBE3s in NEdit and found that it was a great utility. Thanks for all your help.. one of these days I will understand the {}. I would like to find a good way to generate an awk error file, but based on all my recent google searches I think I can find a way to do it. Thanks again!

You're welcome.

Note that if you had given us all of this information in your original post you would have had a working solution hours earlier and saved some of us a lot of extra work.