UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Okay, I search around and couldn't find what I needed, so here goes:

I have a series of ArcGIS point shapefiles. If I open them in Excel I can save as an Excel or text file and get a 2 column list:

Code:

POINTID | GRID_CODE
1 | 2.34234
2 | 4.3425
3 | 6.32456
etc...

The problem is that I have hundreds of shapefiles. Obviously with so many shapfiles, using Excel is impractical to do for EACH one. I'm doing this so I can import only the values from certain points (pointID's) to create charts and graphs Excel. Each shapefile represents a date range, and each point value (from each shapefile) represents an elevation value.

So far I can use "strings" to convert it to an acsii, but that puts it into a single row with thousands of columns.

I can transpose using:

Code:

awk '
{ 
    for (i=1; i<=NF; i++)  {
        a[NR,i] = $i
    }
}
NF>p { p = NF }
END {    
    for(j=1; j<=p; j++) {
        str=a[1,j]
        for(i=2; i<=NR; i++){
            str=str" "a[i,j];
        }
        print str
    }
}' file > file_out

The problem now is that it is a SINGLE column like this (because the source file was a single row - makes sense):

Code:

1
2.34234
2
4.3425
3
6.32456

I want to get a 2 column list like what I can get from using Excel...

Any ideas?

Thanks!

Looks like a one-liner...using the final output you show

Code:

awk '{FOO=$0;getline;print FOO, $0}' file-in-question

I like paste for this kind of merges:

Code:

 $ cat aa
1
line one
2
line two
3
line three
 $ cat aa|paste - -
1       line one
2       line two
3       line three

Thanks guys!