Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi all,

I have a text file that has (4) columns. There are about 300 lines on this file. It is a plain text file. I am looking to write a simple script that will read each line from the file and generate another text file. The file looks something like this:

These are the columns:

StudentName Grade Class Teacher
StudentName2 Grade Class Teacher
...
...
...
StudentName300 Grade Class Teacher

What I need to do is extract the text from this file and re-arrange it into another file.

For example, this is how the new file would be arranged:

Teacher Class Grade StudentName

I can easily do it when a file has just a single line, like this:
-------------------
StudentName = `cat /fileName | awk '{print $1}'
Grade = `cat /fileName | awk '{print $2}'
Class = `cat /fileName | awk '{print $3}'
Teacher = `cat /fileName | awk '{print $4}'

echo "${Teacher} ${Class} ${Grade} ${StudentName}" >> /NewFile
-------------------

Where I am struggling is how would I do this for a file that has 300 lines instead of just one?

I am sure it is something simple, I just need to be pointed in the right direction.

Thanks in advance!

Print the fields in reverse:

Code:

[user@host ~]$ cat file
a b c d
a b c d
a b c d
a b c d
[user@host ~]$ awk '{for (i=NF;i>=1;i--){printf "%s ",$i} {print""}}' file
d c b a
d c b a
d c b a
d c b a
[user@host ~]$

Hint: How about using "one" awk command to read in all the records from the input file, print them in the required format and then output to new file?

Hi all, thanks for the quick responses. I guess I should have mentioned that that I also intend for the script to be able to use each filed as a variable aside from the sorting of the columns. For example, the sorting of the columns will be used to print a report, however, I would also like the script to generate the following text at the bottom of the report:

"The student, ${StudentName} is failing ${Teacher}'s ${Class} with a grade of ${Grade}"

Of course I will add a mechanism to check if the grade is passing or failing, but that I know how to do, It is the assigning variable values from multiple lines that is giving me trouble.

Thanks again in advanced.

You could do something like this to read the fields into a variable:

Code:

while read studentname grade class teacher
do
  echo "${teacher} ${class} ${grade} ${studentname}" >> /path/to/your/new_file
done </path/to/your/file