Hi,

I'm new to both Perl and AWK. I have a text file with tens of thousands of lines arranged by year 1953-2005.

The first line, first field is 'CAN14A2005010101'.

If I use:

awk '/CAN14A2005/' ottawa.txt > ottawa2005.txt

in my cygwin bash window,it performs the operation that I want by copying all the data entries for 2005 and writing them to a new file named appropriately.

I want to avoid having to type that for each year, whats the best way to write a script that will use the awk command and do it for each year? Should I write it in a perl script and use awk commands within that?

If I need to clarify anything, please let me know. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Briana

is the year always at the same position?

Hi,

That worked perfectly, exactly what I needed. Thank you so much!

Briana