UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi,
I have a file whose structure is like this
7
7
1 2 3 4 5
1 3 4 8 6
1 4 5 6 0
2 6 8 3 8
2 5 7 8 0
5 7 9 4 1
3 8 0 2 2
3 5 6 8

basically first two row tell the number of rows and column but the data following them are not arranged in that format. now i want to create another input file in which only the data are there in nxm rows where n and m are number of rows and columns given in the first two lines.

Thank you very much....

You realize that if there are not enough entries in the file there is nothing that will fix the problem except a correct file. Yours is not correct.

Code:

awk 'NR<3' filename | tr -s '\n' ' ' | read rows cols
awk 'NR>2' filename | tr -s ' ' '\n' |\
	awk -v cols=$cols '{printf("%d ", $0)
	  if(NR%cols == 0){printf("\n")}}' > matrixfile