Shell Programming and Scripting

In your original problem, each entry in fit.txt contained 3 lines that contained the string +/- and the awk script I supplied plucked a value from each of these lines and added a new line after find the 3rd matched line in each entry:

Code:

awk -F' *=* +' '/[+]\/-/{printf "%s%s",$2,(++i%3)?" ":"\n"}' fit.txt

Now fit.txt contains entries each of which has 4 lines that contain the string +/- and guess what: the awk script:

Code:

awk -F' *=* +' '/[+]\/-/{printf "%s%s",$2,(++i%4)?" ":"\n"}' fit.txt

will do what you want. With you new fit.txt sample file, it produces:

Code:

0.498062 -0.00287463 -0.017153 -0.0145765
0.497897 -0.00459203 -0.0162969 -0.0139438
0.49692 -0.00889774 -0.0210222 -0.0182511

See the pattern? This pattern will work as long as the number of variables you're concerned about is a constant for any given input file. The logic would be more complex if the number of fields were to vary between entries.

Thanks Don Cragun. It works like magic!!