UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I have a list of people in a usage log and need to print the names and phone numbers of people with over 500 logins. I'd also like to display these names alphabetically.

I have their total logins set to a variable named total.

So far, I have very little in my awk script to do this:

FS=":"
{if ( total > 500 ) print $1, $2}

($1 being both first and last name, $2 being phone number)

There is more to the script than this, but above is the relevant portion.

This only prints one of their names unfortunately, even though my data file clearly has others with totals > 500.

Any advice or pointers here? Thanks!

Sounds like the problem would be in other parts of the logic. Is total calculated once for the whole file, and you run it again and again for each user, or how do you end up with that total?

A common technique is to keep an array of totals where the keys are the users, so you only have to run over the file once.

Code:

awk -F : '{ if (++total[$1] > 500) print $1, $2 }' file

(This will print multiple times, once for each record after the total is exceeded. Figuring out how to avoid that is left as an exercise.)

Once you get it to print what you want, just pipe that output to sort.

Yes, total is calculated above outside of the END statement:
total = $3 + $4 + $5

($3-$5 being fields showing logins for each of three months)

So you have one row per user, not a log with one row per log-in? You're not printing in the END statement then, are you? END only gets evaluated once, at end of file.

To make the story short, post your input and the desired output.