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awk "for loop" question

I'm going through O'Reilly Press' sed and awk by Dougherty&Robins and am having trouble writing a simple "for" loop.

I'm writing a script called acro that accepts parameters from the command line to search a data file

$ acro 1 2 3 4 5

I want each of the passed parameters to be searched through several fields of each record. My original solution to this was:

awk '$2 == search' search=$1 array
awk '$3 == search' search=$1 array
awk '$4 == search' search=$1 array
awk '$5 == search' search=$1 array
awk '$6 == search' search=$1 array

and so on for each of the command line parameters (search=$2 array, search=$3 array, search=$4 array, search=$5 array, search=$6 array).

I decided I wanted to write a loop to save some lines of code and came up with this:

for ( i=2; i=6; i++ )
awk '$i == search' search=$1 array

The above script fails with this error message:

$ ./acro 1 2 3 4 5 6
./acro: line 6: syntax error near unexpected token `i=6'
./acro: line 6: `for i=2; i=6; i++ '

I don't understand the error message. How can I use a "for" loop to get this job done?

Thanks.

Are you trying to call awk from a shell script? If so, then it makes a difference which one you're using. (The for loops in Bourne shell, for example, only operate over lists.) If not, that for loop won't work the way you expect it to in Awk (or many other languages) because the conditional statement is wrong. You have an assignment to variable i, which since it is assigning 6 will always be true. So your loop would start at i=2 and continue going forever. You probably wanted "i <= 6" for your condition.

Yes. "acro" is a shell script under BASH. I'll try your suggestion.

Thanks much.

Well, changing to "for ( i=2; i<=6; i++ )" didn't work. What do you mean "loops in Bourne shell, for example, only operate over lists"? How do I use a list to accomplish my end?

Thanks.

A vanilla "for" loop in the Bourne shell works like this:

Code:

for i in 1 2 3; do

    echo $i

done



# produces



1

2

3

So it may be easier to use a "while" loop instead:

Code:

i=1;

while [ $i -lt 4 ]; do

    echo $i

    i=$(($i+1))

done

which produces the same output. Basically, "for" loops traditionally represented iterators which moved over a predefined set, in this case the list. But in C, they were used more like traditional "while" loops, which has caused some confusion and lead to the introduction of the "foreach" loops in C-based languages like Perl. Anyways, in Bash it's possible to do arithmetic C-style "for" loops:

Code:

for (( i=1; i < 4; i++ )); do

    echo $i

done

produces the same output as the two above. But unfortunately, this will not work in Bourne shell (/bin/sh). Of course, on most Linux systems, /bin/sh is just a symlink to Bash, so it may not be an issue. You'll have to decide which is best for you, but the first form does have an advantage using a list, because the arguments specified on the command line are available in the $@ variable. So this bit of code will print out all the script's arguments:

Code:

for arg in $@; do

    echo $arg

done

Hope this helps.

start learning over here: http://www.linuxcommand.org/
And post back if you have problems ..