Shell Programming and Scripting

there's no need to use cut though. this does the same:

Code:

awk -F"," '{total+=$4}END{print total}' "file"

you can just run the code on this file every hour. no problems with that.

you can take a look here for examples

thanks for your reply ghostdog74
As a matter of fact i donno much about "awk" but it seems fabolous as it has done the whole job in just one line , but since its my first experience with unix and i already know java/cpp , hence developing algo/code using conventional loops and then trying to transform it in unix helps me
i hope you are getting my point

shell_life , typeset doesnt work

Regards

Hi everyone , sorry for bothering again , since question is related to this so i thought i might get help on same thread
for this loop

test2 is input file , how can i echo its very first line "echo $1" isnt working

Regards

The numbered variables $1, $2 etc refer to command line arguments.
The way you have written this script, $name contains each successive line of the file test2, provided that there are no embedded spaces in the line otherwise name represents the first field on each line.
If you only want the first line of the file use the read statement to retrieve line and the exit statement to quit after the first loop, or don't bother with a loop at all and just perform one read and one echo.
Instead of using the 'cat' command to supply data to the variable 'name' use indirection (the < operator) to redirect standard input from the keyboard to a data file.

create the script with the following lines:
while read name
do
echo $name
exit
done

and execute as
scriptname < test2

that is UUOC, IMO.
you can use while loop , for iterating over files

Code:

while read -r line
do
 echo $line
done < "test2"

if you just want to get the first line of test2 into a variable, there are some other ways to do it

Code:

var=$(head -1 test2)

Code:

var=$(read line < file)

Code:

var=$(awk 'NR==1{print}' "file")

dude ow do you create new thread ?

Ghostdog, What does UUOC mean?
Let me guess,
unusually useless operating code
unix user over compensating

ROFLMAO

Jack