Hi All. Thanks for your help in advance.

I have a requirement to examine the number of delimiters in each record of a file. If the record has the expected number of delimiters it should be passed into a 'good' file. If it does not, the record should be passed into a 'bad' file. I have been able to complete this task, but it requires passing over the file twice. With bigger files this may slow down performance. I currently am using:

cat ${landing_dir}/${lfile}|awk -F "${file_delimiter}" "NF !=${file_field_count} {print NR, \$0 }" >> $bad_file

The similar code is used for the 'good' file with slight modifications. Is there a way to do this in only one pass over the file?

Thanks, again!

see the man page of awk. You can directly write into files in the ask script, so you can do something like this (for example):
<condition1> { print > file1 }
<condition2> { print > file2 }

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Two suggestions:

1. Remove cat as awk is designed to read files

2. Use -v option to pass variables into awk as present method could quickly get messy and is extremely confusing to the eye

Other than that, what pan64 said.

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