LinuxQuestions.org - awk record separator question

- Linux - Newbie (https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-newbie-8/)

- - awk record separator question (https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-newbie-8/awk-record-separator-question-573372/)

awk record separator question

Hi.

given a data file 'test' such as:

Code:

test1a test1b test1c

test2a test2b test2c

test3a test3b test3c

within awk I would like to treat each line as a separate field...

but

Code:

awk -v FS='\n' '{print $1}' test

does not give me what I expect. It outputs the entire file rather than the first line...

Code:

test1a test1b test1c

test2a test2b test2c

test3a test3b test3c

Code:

awk -v FS='\n' '{print $2}' test

gives me nothing...

I thought by setting the FS to newline, that test1a test1b test1c would become the first field,
test2a test2b test2c the second. and so on...

therefore I would expect

Code:

awk -v FS='\n' '{print $1}' test

to just give me:

Code:

test1a test1b test1c

Would appreciate if someone could point me in the right direction.

Your understanding of the difference between 'field' and 'record' seems to be part of the problem.

Each line is a record, made up of three fields, seperated by a space.

So, you need to print each line (record) of the file.

Thanks for the reply...

I'm doing this inside a bash while loop. Each record (entire line) is filtered through awk which will write the line to a temporary file...the values in this temporary file will then be passed to a separate program for calculations and so on...

I need awk to output each record as a single field for this purpose...so the problem remains

Code:

#!/bin/bash



i=1



while [ $i -le `wc -l preliminary.file | awk '{print $1}'` ] ; do





  awk  -v FS="\n" -v i="$i" '$1 == i {print $1}' preliminary.file > temp1.file



  read eq date otime elat elon depth mag sac_evt.file station residual error < temp1.file



                          etc.......                  



    i=`expr $i + 1`



done