Shell Programming and Scripting

hi,

i'm a newbie and this is my first post here. 'hope all of you fellow members are doing fine. so here is my first thread to ask for help on how to use awk language to do this task.

i have a file to process and after a series of other awk commands and shell scripts i managed to convert the output into something like this...

string1
string2
string3
string4
string5
string(n)

and by the awk command...

awk 'BEGIN {FS="\n";RS="";ORS=""} { x=1; while (x<NF) {print $x"\t"; x++} print $NF "\n"}'

i get the output...

string1 string2 string3 string4 string5 string6 string7 ....... string(n) - all in one line separated by tab

now, my last task is to separate this line into 3 column each line like...

string1 string2 string3
string4 string5 string6
string7 string8 string(n)

my guess is that i can pipe another awk command to my last awk above or i can just disregard that awk command that converts all string in one line and go directly to the 3 column format but i haven't got any clue on how to do as well. can anyone help me code this in awk?

thanks in advance!

Try:

Code:

awk 'function f (ind,x){for (o=1;o<=ind;o++)printf("%s ",x[o]);printf("\n")} 
     {i++;a[i]=$0;if ( i == 3 ){f(i,a);i=0}}END{if ( i < 3 && i > 0 )f(i,a) }' file

Code:

awk 'NR%3!=0{
 printf "%s ", $0
}
NR%3==0{
 printf "%s\n", $0
}' file

# cat file
string1
string2
string3
string4
string5
string6
string7
string8
string(n)

Code:

#  paste - - - < file1
string1 string2 string3
string4 string5 string6
string7 string8 string(n)

Nice , a slight modification to your code:

Code:

awk 'NR%3!=0{printf "%s ", $0;next}1' file

Or even:

Code:

awk 'ORS=NR%3?" ":"\n"' filename

On Solaris use nawk or /usr/xpg4/bin/awk.

Code:

nawk 'ORS=(FNR%3)?FS:RS' myFile