Assigning variables by awk(?)

bioinformatics_guy · 02-19-2009, 07:43 AM

I have a file of the following form:

123 456
234 678
456 789
...

I want to iterate through each line and save the first number as variable1 and the second as variable2

I was thinking

awk '{print $1}' | (something where I can assign the value to variable1 = $1 or something)

Any suggestions of how to do this or iterate line by line?

colucix · 02-19-2009, 09:25 AM

You can do that without awk. Just use the read statement of the shell in a while loop. Take in mind that read can accept more than one argument, assigning each field of the current line to the specified variables. Then, within the while loop, you can assign the value of these variables to the elements of an array. In this way you can use each value read from the original file later in the script.

schneidz · 02-19-2009, 12:01 PM

man awk
example:

Code:

awk -v totalclaims=$arg1 -v vendor=$arg2 -v vid=$arg5 -v numclaims=$1 \
  'index($0,"H") == 6 && index($0,vid) == 58 {a = a + 1} \
  END {printf " %s - hosp - %d\n", vendor, a / totalclaims * numclaims}' /etc/prod.stats

i think you should post programming related questions in the programming forum: