Shell Programming and Scripting

kristinu,
Sorry for the delay in responding. Hopefully, alister's comments were enough to explain what I was suggesting. If not, the following should work. My script is a little more complex than your original script because the awk I'm using doesn't allow multiple characters in RS. So, you can simplify it on your system, but the following is more portable to other systems.

Code:

awk 'NR == 1 || $1 == ">" {
        if(r++) close(cmd)
        cmd = sprintf("%s %s > p%03d.ps", "psxy -JX4/4 -R0.3/0.6/0/1.2",
                "-B0.1f0.05:\"\":/a0.2f0.1:\"y\":/a0.2f0.1:.\"\":WSne -m -K", r)
        if(NR > 1) next
}
{       print | cmd
}' p.dat

If you wanted to run this on a Solaris/SunOS system, you'd need to use /usr/xpg4/bin/awk or nawk instead of awk.

Note that this script produces files p001.ps, p002.ps, etc. If you have less than 100 sections or more than 1000 sections in p.dat, you could change the %03d in the sprintf() format string to specify a different number of digits in the output file names.

Hope this helps,
Don

I want to append the psxy to the same ps file

OK. So try:

Code:

rm p.ps 2> /dev/null
awk 'NR == 1 || $1 == ">" {
        if(cmd != "") close(cmd)
        cmd = sprintf("%s %s >> p.ps", "psxy -JX4/4 -R0.3/0.6/0/1.2",
                "-B0.1f0.05:\"\":/a0.2f0.1:\"y\":/a0.2f0.1:.\"\":WSne -m -K")
        if(NR > 1) next
}
{       print | cmd
}' p.dat

Delete the rm command if you want this to add to an existing p.ps file rather than creating a new one for each p.dat file.

I have not tested it, but it looks like that code will send a ">" into the pipe if the first "dataset" is empty. Also, if a "dataset" is empty, should psxy be invoked and immediately read EOF? If so, then the above is incorrect in that respect as well.

The problem statement was insufficiently precise to make those determinations, so neither case may be of concern. Just an observation.

Regards,
Alister

I am going to go with a simple loop in bash, moving by record number

Thanks Alister,
I considered both of these issues, but the idea of graphing zero points didn't make any sense to me. So, I didn't worry about those cases. However, I should have stated my assumptions when I posted my proposal.

- Don