I have a directory with multiple csv text files, each with a single line in the format:
field1,field2,field3,560
I need to output the sum of the fourth field across all files in a directory (can be hundreds or thousands of files). So for an example of:
file1.txt
field1,field2,field3,560
file2.txt
field1,field2,field3,415
file3.txt
field1,field2,field3,672
The output would simply be:
1647
I've been trying a few different things, with the most promising being an awk command that I found here in response to another user's question. It doesn't quite do what I need it to do, and I am an awk newb so I'm unsure how to modify it to work for my purpose:
awk -F"," 'NR==FNR{a[NR]=$4;next}{print $4+a[FNR]:' file1.txt file2.txt
This correctly outputs 975.
However if I try pass it a 3rd file, rather than add field 4 from all 3 files, it adds file1 to file2, then file1 to file3:
awk -F"," 'NR==FNR{a[NR]=$4;next}{print $4+a[FNR]:' file1.txt file2.txt file3.txt
975
1232
Can anyone show me how I can modify this awk statement to accept more than two files or, ideally because there are thousands of files to sum up, an * to output the sum of the fourth field of all files in the directory?
Thank you for your time and assistance.
A couple issues with the current code:
NR==FNR is used to indicate special processing for the 1st file; in this case there is no processing that is 'special' for just the 1st file (ie, all files are to be processed the same)
an array (eg, a[NR]) is used to maintain a set of values; in this case you only have one global value to maintain so there is no need for an array
Since you're only looking for one global sum, a bit more simpler code should suffice:
$ awk -F',' '{sum+=$4} END {print sum+0}' file{1..3}.txt
1647
NOTES:
in the (unlikely?) case all files are empty, sum will be undefined so print sum will display a blank link; sum+0 insures we print 0 if sum remains undefined (ie, all files are empty)
for a variable number of files file{1..3}.txt can be replaced with whatever pattern will match on the desired set of files, eg, file*.txt, *.txt, etc
Here we go (no need to test NR==FNR in a concatenation):
$ cat file{1,2,3}.txt | awk -F, '{count+=$4}END{print count}'
1647
Or same-same 🇹🇠(without wasting some pipe(s)):
$ awk -F, '{count+=$4}END{print count}' file{1,2,3}.txt
1647
$ perl -MList::Util=sum0 -F, -lane'push #a,$F[3];END{print sum0 #a}' file{1..3}.txt
1647
$ perl -F, -lane'push #a,$F[3];END{foreach(#a){ $sum +=$_ };print "$sum"}' file{1..3}.txt
1647
$ cut -d, -f4 file{1..3}.txt | paste -sd+ - | bc
1647
cat file1.txt | awk -F '{print $1 "|~|" $2 "|~|" $3}' > file2.txt
I am using above command to filter first three columns from file1 and put into file.
But only getting the column names and not the column data.
How to do that?
|~| - is the delimiter.
file1.txt has values as :
a|~|b|~|c|~|d|~|e
1|~|2|~|3|~|4|~|5
11|~|22|~|33|~|44|~|55
111|~|222|~|333|~|444|~|555
my expedted output is :
a|~|b|~|c
1|~|2|~|3
11|~|22|~|33
111|~|222|~|333
With your shown samples, please try following awk code. You need to set field separator to |~| and remove starting space from lines, then print the lines.
awk -F'\\|~\\|' -v OFS='|~|' '{sub(/^[[:blank:]]+/,"");print $1,$2,$3}' Input_file
In case you want to keep spaces(which was in initial post before edit) then try following:
awk -F'\\|~\\|' -v OFS='|~|' '{print $1,$2,$3}' Input_file
NOTE: Had a chat with user in room and got to know why this code was not working for user because of gunzip -c file was being used wrongly, its output was being saved into a variable on which user was running awk program, so correcting that command generated right file and awk program ran fine on it. Adding this as a reference for future readers.
One approach would be:
awk -v FS="," -v OFS="|~|" '{gsub(/[|][~][|]/,","); sub(/^\s*/,""); print $1,$2,$3}' file1.txt
The approach simply replaces all "|~|" with a "," setting the output file separator to "|~|". All leading whitespace is trimmed with sub().
Example Use/Output
With your data in file1.txt, you would have:
$ awk -v FS="," -v OFS="|~|" '{gsub(/[|][~][|]/,","); sub(/^\s*/,""); print $1,$2,$3}' file1.txt
a|~|b|~|c
1|~|2|~|3
11|~|22|~|33
111|~|222|~|333
Let me know if this is what you intended. You can simply redirect, e.g. > file2.txt to write to the second file.
For such cases, my bash+awk script rcut comes in handy:
rcut -Fd'|~|' -f-3 ip.txt
The -F option enables fixed string input delimiter (which is given using the -d option). And by default, the output field separator will also be same as -d when -F is active. -f-3 is similar to cut syntax to specify first three fields.
For better speed, use hck command:
hck -Ld'|~|' -D'|~|' -f-3 ip.txt
Here, -L enables literal field separator and -D specifies output field separator.
Another benefit is that hck supports -z option to automatically handle common compressed formats based on filename extension (adding this since OP had an issue with compressed input).
Another way:
sed 's/|~|/\t/g' file1.txt | awk '{print $1"|~|"$2"|~|"$3}' > file2.txt
First replace the |~| delimiter, and use the default awk separator, then print columns what you need.
I have an input csv file that looks something like:
Name,Index,Location,ID,Message
Alexis,10,Punggol,4090b43,Production 4090b43
Scott,20,Bedok,bfb34d3,Prevent
Ronald,30,one-north,86defac,Difference 86defac
Cindy,40,Punggol,40d0ced,Central
Eric,50,one-north,aeff08d,Military aeff08d
David,60,Bedok,5d1152d,Study
And I want to write a bash shell script using awk and gsub to replace 6-7 alpha numeric character long strings under the ID column with "xxxxx", with the output in a separate .csv file.
Right now I've got:
#!/bin/bash
awk -F ',' -v OFS=',' '{gsub(/^([a-zA-Z0-9]){6,7}/g, "xxxxx", $4);}1' input.csv > output.csv
But the output from I'm getting from running bash myscript.sh input.csv doesn't make any sense. The output.csv file looks like:
Name,Index,Location,ID,Message
Alexis,10,Punggol,4xxxxx9xxxxxb43,Production 4090b43
Scott,20,Bedok,bfb34d3,Prevent
Ronald,30,one-north,86defac,Difference 86defac
Cindy,40,Punggol,4xxxxxdxxxxxced,Central
Eric,50,one-north,aeffxxxxx8d,Military aeff08d
David,60,Bedok,5d1152d,Study
but the expected output csv should look like:
Name,Index,Location,ID,Message
Alexis,10,Punggol,xxxxx,Production 4090b43
Scott,20,Bedok,xxxxx,Prevent
Ronald,30,one-north,xxxxx,Difference 86defac
Cindy,40,Punggol,xxxxx,Central
Eric,50,one-north,xxxxx,Military aeff08d
David,60,Bedok,xxxxx,Study
With your shown sample, please try the following code:
awk -F ',[[:space:]]+' -v OFS=',\t' '
{
sub(/^([a-zA-Z0-9]){6,7}$/, "xxxxx", $4)
$1=$1
}
1
' Input_file | column -t -s $'\t'
Explanation: Setting field separator as comma, space(s), then setting output field separator as comma tab here. Then substituting from starting to till end of value(6 to 7 occurrences) of alphanumeric(s) with xxxxx in 4th field. Finally printing current line. Then sending output of awk program to column command to make it as per shown sample of OP.
EDIT: In case your Input_file is separated by only , as per edited samples now, then try following.
awk -F ',' -v OFS=',' '
{
sub(/^([a-zA-Z0-9]){6,7}$/, "xxxxx", $4)
}
1
' Input_file
Note: OP has installed latest version of awk from older version and these codes helped.
The short version to your answer would be the following:
$ awk 'BEGIN{FS=OFS=","}(FNR>1){$4="xxxxxx"}1' file
This will replace all entries in column 4 by "xxxxxx".
If you only want to change the first 6 to 7 characters of column 4 (and not if there are only 5 of them, there are a couple of ways:
$ awk 'BEGIN{FS=OFS=","}(FNR>1)&&(length($4)>5){$4="xxxxxx" substr($4,8)}1' file
$ awk 'BEGIN{FS=OFS=","}(FNR>1)&&{sub(/.......?/,"xxxxxx",$4)}1' file
Here, we will replace 123456abcde into xxxxxxabcde
Why is your script failing:
Besides the fact that the approach is wrong, I'll try to explain what the following command does: gsub(/([a-zA-Z0-9]){6,7}/g,"xxxxx",$4)
The notation /abc/g is valid awk syntax, but it does not do what you expect it to do. The notation /abc/ is an ERE-token (an extended regular expression). The notation g is, at this point, nothing more than an undefined variable which defaults to an empty string or zero, depending on its usage. awk will now try to execute the operation /abc/g by first executing /abc/ which means: if my current record ($0) matches the regular expression "abc", return 1 otherwise return 0. So it converts /abc/g into 0g which means to concatenate the content of g to the number 0. For this, it will convert the number 0 to a string "0" and concatenate it with the empty string g. In the end, your gsub command is equivalent to gsub("0","xxxxx",$4) and means to replace all the ZERO's by "xxxxx".
Why are you getting always gsub("0","xxxxx",$4) and never gsub("1","xxxxx",$4). The reason is that your initial regular expression never matches anything in the full record/line ($0). Your reguar expression reads /^([a-zA-Z0-9]){6,7}/, and while there are lines that start with 6 or 7 characters, it is likely that your awk does not recognize the extended regular expression notation '{m,n}' which makes it fail. If you use gnu awk, the output would be different when using -re-interval which in old versions of GNU awk is not enabled by default.
I tried to find why your code behave like that, for simplicty sake I made example concering only gsub you have used:
awk 'BEGIN{id="4090b43"}END{gsub(/^([a-zA-Z0-9]){6,7}/g, "xxxxx", id);print id}' emptyfile.txt
output is
4xxxxx9xxxxxb43
after removing g in first argument
awk 'BEGIN{id="4090b43"}END{gsub(/^([a-zA-Z0-9]){6,7}/, "xxxxx", id);print id}' emptyfile.txt
output is
xxxxx
So regular expression followed by g caused malfunction. I was unable to find relevant passage in GNU AWK manual what g after / is supposed to do.
(tested in gawk 4.2.1)
I am working with bash script that has this command in it.
awk -F ‘‘ ‘/abc/{print $3}’|xargs
What is the meaning of this command?? Assume input is provided to awk.
The quick answer is it'll do different things depending on the version of awk you're running and how many fields of output the awk script produces.
I assume you meant to write:
awk -F '' '/abc/{print $3}'|xargs
not the syntactically invalid (due to "smart quotes"):
awk -F ‘’’/abc/{print $3}’|xargs
-F '' is undefined behavior per POSIX so what it will do depends on the version of awk you're running. In some awks it'll split the current line into 1 character per field. in others it'll be ignored and the line will be split into fields at every sequence of white space. In other awks still it could do anything else.
/abc/ looks for a string matching the regexp abc on the current line and if found invokes the subsequent action, in this case {print $3}.
However it's split into fields, print $3 will print the 3rd such field.
xargs as used will just print chunks of the multi-line input it's getting all on 1 line so you could get 1 line of all-fields output if you don't have many fields being output or several lines of multi-field output if you do.
I suspect the intent of that code was to do what this code actually will do in any awk alone:
awk '/abc/{printf "%s%s", sep, substr($0,3,1); sep=OFS} END{print ""}'
e.g.:
$ printf 'foo\nxabc\nyzabc\nbar\n' |
awk '/abc/{printf "%s%s", sep, substr($0,3,1); sep=OFS} END{print ""}'
b a
I currently have this line of code, that needs to be increased by one every-time in run this script. I would like to use awk in increasing the third string (570).
'set t 570'
I currently have this to change the code, however I am missing the closing quotation mark. I would also desire that this only acts on this specific (above) line, however am unsure about where to place the syntax that awk uses to do that.
awk '/set t /{$3+=1} 1' file.gs >file.tmp && mv file.tmp file.gs
Thank you very much for your input.
Use sub() to perform a replacement on the string itself:
$ awk '/set t/ {sub($3+0,$3+1,$3)} 1' file
'set t 571'
This looks for the value in $3 and replaces it with itself +1. To avoid replacing all of $3 and making sure the quote persists in the string, we say $3+0 so that it evaluates to just the number, not the quote:
$ echo "'set t 570'" | awk '{print $3}'
570'
$ echo "'set t 570'" | awk '{print $3+0}'
570
Note this would fail if the value in $3 happens more times in the same line, since it will replace all of them.