I have a file with content 1 arnone 100 1 arnone 100 4 temp 20 2 temp 10 ... and so on 2 arnone 200 6 temp 30 how do i achieve this result? thanks in advance

I do no think you stated what you want your result to be.

the result should be 2 arnone 200 6 temp 30 FROM 1 arnone 100 1 arnone 100 4 temp 20 2 temp 10

Try: #!/usr/bin/ksh for var in $(cat tfile|awk '{print $2}'|sort -u);do grep $var tfile > temp.file ftot=0 stot=0 while read line;do fnum=$(print $line|awk '{print $1}') snum=$(print $line|awk '{print $3}') ftot=$(($ftot+$fnum)) stot=$(($stot+$snum)) done < temp.file print $ftot $var $stot done

This is a standard control-break approach.  When the key field changes, a summary line is printed and the accumulators reset to zero. It assumes that the input file is already sorted by the key field.  If not, you could insert a sort command in this script. Instead of shell script, awk could do the same control-break processing on a sorted file.  Or awk could process an unsorted file, accumulating the values in an array, and that would actually be less code. #!/bin/bash holdkey= ftot=0 stot=0 while read num1 key num2 do if [ "$key" != "$holdkey" ] ; then    if [ "$holdkey" != "" ] ; then       echo $tot1 $holdkey $tot2    fi    holdkey=$key    tot1=0    tot2=0 fi ((tot1=tot1+num1)) ((tot2=tot2+num2)) done < filein # print totals for final key group echo $tot1 $holdkey $tot2 2 arnone 200 6 temp 30