Hi there,

I have a file: list.txt that contains this:

and want to count the total of numbers that are higher than x. If x is 7 than the answer in my example above would be 3. FYI: My actual files have hundreds of values in one column and also contain decimals.

I can imagine that awk may do the trick, but could not find it in my regular references:
http://www.grymoire.com/Unix/Awk.html
http://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/gawk.html

Your help is appreciated a lot!

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Thanks dugan. It indeed works for the sample data.

There are two issues:

1.
If I try your line and use not 8-9 but 8-10, it doesn't work. Even if I add 10 and 11 to my list (is it limited to 1 digit?)

2.
More importantly, as you also acknowledged, my real data is more complex.
Here is a sample if the read data:

and I would like to know how many are above, say, 0.05.

Thanks!

I edited my post to give you a better answer.

I don't mind providing a single line to help with homework, but may I ask what the real-world problem was?

The original solution, btw, was indeed limited to one digit integers:

I recommend learning enough about regular expressions to understand why.

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your edited first post indeed does the trick! Very nice. Thanks Dugan!

My real world problem: People were lying in an MRI scanner to measure changes in neuronal activity over time. During 10 minutes their brain is measured every 2.5 seconds (one measure is called one volume in 3D, there are 240 volumes, creating a 4D dataset). People are instructed to lie as still as possible but regardless people move more or less. We perform rigid body motion correction on each volume (fitting each volume to the first volume and storing this as a new 4D dataset). The file above is the relative motion correction in 3-D space (so in x-y-z direction) in millimeters. And with relative I mean changes from one volume to the next, and not absolute (change from the first volume). I want to know how many times a person has moved more than .5 mm. That's what your one liner is going to do... I have to do this for a couple of hundred subjects. So my life just got a lot easier, thanks! I'm a psychologist working with brain data... in the process I've learned some programming, but I should indeed learn a bit more about regular expressions.

You can also do it completely in awk:

Awk is neat because it has C-like and sometimes C compatible syntax (printf). Great for working with tables of data, and with floating point arithmetic.

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H_TeXMeX_H: also big thanks! This is even easier to combine in an awk one-liner with some other stats that I need to extract.

Probably not of great value here but you can also use awk to condense things like this (at the expense of readability):

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One more additional question (and it's not crucial, but it would be nice to solve). If I run this one:

and for one file there is not a single number larger than 0.05, the output will be empty (=nothing).

Is it easy to output a zero in that case (how do the "if then else" rules work in awk??)

@ Mike_V; In regards to learning a bit more about regular expressions, regexp, this got me started. http://www.regular-expressions.info/tutorial.html

or

It's true in that case case it outputs nothing.

Yes, C-like syntax = if else clauses:

or like grail suggests you can initialize it yourself for safety (I usually do anyway to avoid stuff like this):

excellent! thanks again