UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hello,

Merry Christmas to all! I wish you the best for these holidays and the best for the next year 2011.

I'd like your help please, I need to delete all the rows in the third column of my file, but without touching nor changing the first and last value position, this is an example of my file structure:

Code:

1 5 1
2 5 1
3 5 1
4 5 1
5 5 1

and I need it like this:

Code:

1 5 1
2 5 
3 5 
4 5 
5 5 1

The length of my files varies between 3000 and 5000 records. I used tail and head (-1 in both cases) but this doesn't work given these records appear together at the end. I was thinking about replacing all the values in the third column with a blank space, avoiding the first and last column, but don't know how to do it, perhaps this a better way to do it.

I'd be very grateful for your suppot.

Thanks in advance.

try this:

Code:

awk ' NR==1 {printf("%s", $0); next} 
      {printf("\n%s %s", $1, $2);extra=$3 }
      END {print " ", extra} ' inputfile > ourputfile

Thank you so much! it works perfectly.