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bashawk
Carlos
Carlos

Reputation: 391

Writing to multiple files with awk

I have some text files which have several columns. I'm using awk to only write the columns I want into an output file which I later analyze. 

awk 'BEGIN {FS="\t"}; {print $2,FS,$3,FS,$4} input_files*.txt >> output_file.txt

Can I go one step farther and redirect the output of my awk command to more than one file depending on the value of let's say column $5? If column $5 = A, B, C and D I would end up with something like:

output_file_A.txt
output_file_B.txt
output_file_C.txt
output_file_D.txt

Thanks.

Carlos

Upvotes: 4

Views: 6996

Answers (2)

nu11p01n73R
nu11p01n73R

Reputation: 26667

 awk 'BEGIN {FS="\t"}; {print $2,FS,$3,FS,$4 >> "output_file_"$5} input_files*.txt

The redirection within awk works exactly like the terminal.

Upvotes: 7

anubhava
anubhava

Reputation: 785256

You can use this awk:

awk 'BEGIN {FS="\t"}; {fn="output_file_" $5 ".txt"} {print $2,FS,$3,FS,$4 > fn} input_files*.txt

Upvotes: 3

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