Hi Guys,
just started with Linux and I'm trying to create new files for each line of my input file. So I have file with 637 lines of data:

2 4 6
2 8 5
3 0 5
etc

and want to create a new file from each line. With

cat name.txt | awk '{ line = $0
print line
}'

I nicely see all lines, but what rests is to save each line separately into new file. I tried While read line command in combination with output >> $.txt, but didn't work well....

Thanks!

cat file | while read LINE; do echo $LINE > $LINE.txt; done

the filename is pretty useless but that will achieve what you wanted.

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Thanks it worked! First I had error saying ambiguous redirect but after putting variable in quotes it turned out well.

Regarding the filename the output is indeed quite useless.... So how could I refer the filename to the first column, and not including this first column (=name) into the contents of the new files? Thanks!

Not sure about the filename part, since from your example there are two lines whose first columns have the same value. Are they supposed to be written in the same file? In this case:
This will exclude the first column (field) from the content of the files. If you want to put all the lines in different files (despite the value of the first field) you can use a counter so that file something_001.txt contains the first line, something_002.txt contain the second line and so on. For example:
Hope this helps.

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Ok, the good thing is that it works for most of the files. However, it gives problems with longer file names which contains letter+text such as M25162 and M36384. In that case it will also treat the last numbers as columns. Any idea to solve this? Thanks!

Please explain your last assertion. What numbers are treated as columns? Please, show us an example of real input (one of the not working cases) and the desired output.

If I run

awk '{print substr($0,match($0,$2)) >> ( $1 ".txt" )}' filename

for the following data in filename:

M1738 1 3 4
M2524 2 4 5
M8392 3 5 6
M26 4 6 7
M632 5 7 8

then for files M26 and M632 it indeed uses contents of the first column as name for the output file and excludes the first column for contents. However, for the other files a column with the numbers of the first column is also included. For instance for M2524. The name of the created file is working well (M2524), but when I open the file the columns are:

2524 2 4 5

Whereas I want to exclude 2524 as succeeded for M26 and M632. Guess this has to do with the substr and match criteria in the command, but don't really understand how this works and how to solve this....

Thanks guys

Yes. You're right, it's not a robust solution since the second field can be a substring of the first one. This is independent from the actual content and prints out the fields from the second to the last:

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Another alternative: