CODEWITHSUNDEEP
loopsunixawk
AnkP
AnkP

Reputation: 651

copy set of every 3 colums to a new file in unix

I have a file with 30 columns ( repeated ID Name and Place) and I need to extract 3 columns at time and put them into a new file every-time : 

ID Name Place ID Name Place ID Name Place ID Name place ...
19 john  NY  23 Key NY 22 Tom Ny 24 Jeff NY....
20 Jen NY 22 Jill NY 22 Ki LA 34 Jack Roh ....

So I will have 10 files like these -

Output1.txt 

ID Name Place 
19 john NY 
20 Jen NY

Output2.txt 

ID Name Place 
23 Key NY
22 Jill NY

and 8 more files like these. I can print columns like awk '{print $1,$2,$3}' Input.txt > Output1.txt but it may be too cumbersome for 10 files. Is there anyway I can make it faster?

Thanks!

Upvotes: 1

Views: 54

Answers (3)

James Brown
James Brown

Reputation: 37404

$ awk '{for(i=0;i<=NF/3-1;i++) print $(i*3+1), $(i*3+2), $(i*3+3)>i+1".txt"}' file
$ cat 1.txt
ID Name Place
19 john NY
20 Jen NY

Upvotes: 1

Inian
Inian

Reputation: 85663

Tweaking a bit from this wonderful Ed Morton's answer, 

awk -v d=3 '{sfx=0; for(i=1;i<=NF;i+=d) {str=fs=""; for(j=i;j<i+d;j++) \ 
      {str = str fs $j; fs=" "}; print str > ("output_file_" ++sfx)} }' file

will do the split-up of files as you requested.

Remember the awk variable d defines the number of columns to split-upon which is 3 in your case.

Upvotes: 3

jas
jas

Reputation: 10865

$ awk '{for (i=1;i<=NF;i+=3) {print $i,$(i+1),$(i+2) > ("output" ((i+2)/3) ".txt")}}' file.txt

#  output1.txt
ID Name Place
19 john NY
20 Jen NY

#  output2.txt
ID Name Place
23 Key NY
22 Jill NY

#  output3.txt
ID Name Place
22 Tom Ny
22 Ki LA

#  output4.txt
ID Name place
24 Jeff NY
34 Jack Roh

Upvotes: 3

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