Re: sed or awk under XP in batch file (DOS box) - print $1 lines then delete $1 lines from a file

On Fri, 02 May 2008 09:13:35 +1000, John Bartley K7AAY  
<[email protected]> wrote:

> On May 1, 4:02 pm, [email protected] (Bob Proulx) wrote:
>> John Bartley K7AAY wrote:
>> > I need to print $1 lines from a file, and then delete that number of
>> > lines.
>> > $1 has been derived in the prior line with
>> > wc -l sourcefile.txt | awk '{$1 /= 4 ; $1 = int($1) ; print $1 }'
>>
>> That all looks okay.  But I would probably personally do it all in the
>> shell.  Try this:
>>
>>   echo $(( $(wc -l < sourcefile.txt) / 4 ))
>>
>> > I've tried numerous awk and sed statements, a la:
>>
>> > sed -e -n "$1,p" sourcefile.txt > list.1
>> > sed -i "$1d" sourcefile.txt
>> > sed $1q list.txt > list.1 & sed -i $1d sourcefile.txt
>> > awk "{(FNR < $1); print}" sourcefile.txt > list.1
>>
>> Try this:
>>
>>   l=$(( $(wc -l < sourcefile.txt) / 4 ))
>>   sed --in-place "1,${l}d" sourcefile.txt
>>
>> Bob
>
> Dangit, those don't work as you expected with XP and GNUwin32
>
> echo $(( $(wc -l < sourcefile.txt) / 4 ))
> The system cannot find the file specified.
>
> l=$(( $(wc -l < sourcefile.txt) / 4 ))
> The system cannot find the file specified.
>
> sed --in-place "1,${l}d" sourcefile.txt
> sed: -e expression #1, char 7: extra characters after command
>

To set the output of a command to a variable in cmd.exe, use this hack:

for /f %i in ('"<command>"') do set VARIABLE=%i

So for your problem, here's a solution:

for /f %i in ('"wc -l sourcefile.txt"') do set /a LINES=%i/4
split -l %LINES% sourcefile.txt

"set /a" instructs cmd.exe to evaluate a numerical expression.

PS. John, I replied to your original message in alt.msdos.batch.nt (I was  
reading newsgroups in alphabetical order).

-- 
Kam-Hung Soh <a href="http://kamhungsoh.com/blog">Software Salariman</a>