UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi all,

I have a question regarding passing specific fields from files to shell scripts as variables. I have 2 files, I want to compare the record counts of these files in a shell script. Thus far I have done:

wc -l file1 > file1test

yields: 73 filename

wc -l file2 > file2test
yields: 73 filename

What I want to do is take the 73 field from each file and store them in separate variables, then use those variables in a conditional statement.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Code:

VARIABLE_1=`wc -l file1 | awk -F\  '{print $1}'`
VARIABLE_2=`wc -l file2 | awk -F\  '{print $1}'`

or ...

Code:

VARIABLE_1=`awk 'END {print NR}' file1`
VARIABLE_2=`awk 'END {print NR}' file2`

Now you made me wonder if one was faster.

Code:

$ time awk 'END {print NR}' bigfile
1314268

real    1m50.36s
user    1m42.52s
sys     0m5.35s

$ time wc -l bigfile | awk -F\  '{print $1}'
1314268

real    0m18.67s
user    0m13.19s
sys     0m4.33s

All,

Thanks alot, this worked well. I appreciate the help!!!