I am reading a file and want to return $1 (a directory path) followed by the rest of the line i.e. $2 to the end of the line.

my script so far is

cat file.txt |while read line;
do

FILE=`echo $line | awk '{for (i=2; i<=NF; i++) printf("%s ", $i) printf("\n") }'`

done

But this is not working

All help apprectiaed

Declan

I didn’t quite understand your question. If you cud give me a sample input and ouput, may be I can help you..

Do you mean, you want to print only $1 and $2 for each line in the file?
If so-
Awk ‘{print $1,$2}’ filename > outfile

Regards,
Devaraj Takhellambam

Devaraj

Thanks for the reply, the problem is that I am reading a file which sometimes has two positional parameters but sometimes it has more. I.e..

File.txt

/Home/temp/user /Thisismyhome/
/Home/temp/newuser /Thisismyhome/
/Home/temp/bob /Thisismyhome and something/

When I print $1,$2 I get

/Home/temp/user /Thisismyhome/
/Home/temp/newuser /Thisismyhome/
/Home/temp/bob /Thisismyhome

But I need to include the “and something/” from the last line i.e. $3 and $4

So I want to print something like $1, $2* (the star being to the end of the line)

Any ideas?

Thanks again for you help

Declan

You could create two awk scripts - the first gets just the first fields and the second gets from field 2 to the end of the line. I chose to create one awk script that places a pipe symbol between the first and second fields. Then I use a while loop to do the parsing. I export the variables if I want to use them outside of the inner while loop:

#!/bin/ksh

while read line;
do

t2fields=$(echo "$line" | awk '{
fx=$2
for (i=3; i<=NF; i++)
fx=fx" "$i
printf("%s|%s", $1, fx)
}')

echo "$t2fields" |while IFS="|" read f1 f2
do
export myf1="$f1"
export myf2="$f2"
done

echo "$myf1"
echo "$myf2"

done < file.txt
# end script

Maybe somebody smarter than I can come up with a better solution.

I hope I'm interpreting what you want correctly.

as you said-
So I want to print something like $1, $2* (the star being to the end of the line)

End of the line..
You can try this although it is the same as printing the whole line....if you cud give me the sample input with different variations and what exactly you are trying to do..it will be easier...

awk '{ first=$1; min=index($0," ")-index($2,"/")+1;max=length($0);print "first one is", first,"second one is ",substr($0,min,max)}' infile

Devaraj Takhellambam

Regards,
Devaraj Takhellambam

you may wan to do something like this...

awk '{ first=$1; min=index($0," ")-index($2,"/");max=leng th($0);print first,substr($0,min,max)}' infile

Regards,
Devaraj Takhellambam