Hello,

I have following problem:

-I have a file containing several columns which are separated by a semicolon.

-The first column is numerical an in decreasing order

-I want to copy THE FIRST complete line, in which the first column satisfies a "less or equal than" condition to an other file.

How can this goal be reached? I used several awk or grep commands but I did not arrive to a solution.

Any help would highly be appreciated.

Best regards!

HI,
can you show us what you tried?

The initial string which worked was:

grep -m 1 "^$criteria" output.txt >> $SPATH

But this makes just a 1:1 comparison.

As soon as I insert a comparison command
e.g.:

grep -m 1 "^<$criteria" output.txt >> $SPATH

the string does not work anymore :/

Can you show use some example data and what you want to see.

Sure.
Data:
1.35882590673424 0
1.35084758122717 5E-06
1.34268295888141 1E-05
1.3274715977362 1.5E-05
1.31225475065331 2E-05
1.29709920692472 2.5E-05
1.28193363539596 3E-05
1.26682070357858 3.5E-05
1.2517299445711 4E-05
1.23663918556361 4.5E-05
1.22165136555059 5E-05
1.20666289839408 5.5E-05
1.19167443123757 6E-05
1.17682845682672 6.5E-05
1.1619741431878 7E-05
1.14711982954889 7.50000000000001E-05
1.13240869093759 8.00000000000001E-05
1.1177254412216 8.50000000000001E-05
1.10304219150561 9.00000000000001E-05
1.08842268822075 9.50000000000001E-05
1.07395364551007 0.0001
1.05948460279939 0.000105
1.04501556008871 0.00011
1.03065536767132 0.000115
1.01645208010549 0.00012
1.00224879253967 0.000125
.988045504973844 0.00013
.973873409588848 0.000135

Desired output: first line in which the first column is less than 1.2:

1.19167443123757 6E-05

(the actual column separator is a space bar and not a semicolon as written in my first post)

I think in your case awk would be a better choice:

Wow, your awk command works superb!

It's clean and efficient

Thank you a lot for your kind support!

[QUOTE=fd99;4955528]

Sorry to bother you again, but actually I was happy a bit to early. Actually it does not work and writes no output...

it will write the result into file2 (if there was a line)