Shell Programming and Scripting

I currently have two programs written in C named "remove" and "calculate.

When I call ./remove it removes some data from stdin.
When I call ./calculate which takes in an argument and also data from stdin and calculates and returns a value.

Currently writing a script that calls both of these programs.

I call my script with the following:

Code:

    ./calc.sh input.txt 2 3 4 5

where "2 3 4 5" are arguments and input.txt has:

Code:

    abcd:1,2:3,4
    efgh:5,4:4,4
    hijk:3,1:4,9

Running the remove program returns

Code:

    abcd:1,2:3,4
    efgh:5,4:4,4

The format I would like it in:

Code:

   1 2 3 4
   5 4 4 4

My script is currently:

Code:

    ./remove "$1" | ./calculate "$1" "$2" "$3" "$4" < awk -F ':,' '

How do I fix the script so that I select the columns of integers from input.txt and switch them into my desired form and submit it into ./calculate as stdin along with "2 3 4 5" with arguments?

Please use CODE tags when showing sample input, output, and code in your posts.

I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to do, but it seems like something like this would come close to doing what you want. This does not care if there are leading spaces in the output from remove and will only put one leading space in the data it feeds into calculate. If you really want four leading spaces in the output from the awk code, I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader:

Code:

file="$1"
shift
./remove "$file" | awk -F'[,:]' '{$1="";print}' OFS=' ' - | ./calculate "$@"

Note that this will work with any number of fields in the output from remove (just removing the 1st field from the output) instead of assuming that there will be five fields in the input and four fields in the output. And, it will pass zero or more operands from the calc.sh command line to calculate rather than the fixed four arguments you seem to be assuming. If you want to verify that calc.sh is called with exactly five operands, I will leave that as an exercise for the reader.

You haven't said what operating system or shell you're using. This makes the wild assumption that you're using a shell that recognizes Bourne shell syntax.

And, if you want to try this on a Solaris/SunOS system, change awk to /usr/xpg4/bin/awk.