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up vote 2 down vote favorite

I'm extracting rows from a set of text files with awk. The files look like this:

1000    1    75
1000    2    76
1001    1    76
1001    2    80

I'm searching several directories of these with this command:

awk -F"\t" '$3 == "76" { print $1"\t"$2}' ../benchmark/*/labels.txt

awk is giving me the correct output:

1000    2
1001    1

Now for each found row I must execute a script passing these two numbers as parameters, like this:

./build.oct 1000    2

What's the correct way to do that? I don't really care about script console output (it produces files).

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3 Answers 3

up vote 3 down vote accepted

You can also use xargs (-l makes it run a separate command for each line):

timp@helez:~/tmp$ awk -F"\t" '$3 == "76" { print $1"\t"$2}' test.txt | xargs -l ./build.oct 
$1 is  1000  and $2 is  2
$1 is  1001  and $2 is  1

timp@helez:~/tmp$ cat test.txt
1000    1   75
1000    2   76
1001    1   76
1001    2   80
timp@helez:~/tmp$ cat build.oct
echo '$1 is ' $1 ' and $2 is ' $2

As suggested in the comments you can also simplify the awk command, since both awk and xargs split on both tabs and spaces:

timp@helez:~/tmp$ awk '$3 == "76" {print $1,$2}' test.txt | xargs -l ./build.oct
$1 is  1000  and $2 is  2
$1 is  1001  and $2 is  1
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This one worked! :) Thanks. –  Kuroki Kaze Jun 18 at 8:17
1  
You can simplify it to print $1,$2 since xargs will split on space as well as on tab characters. –  Stéphane Chazelas Jun 18 at 8:57
    
@stéphane-chazelas, correct; I was following the example of the original asker, but it can be simplified. I'll add a note to my answer about the shorter version of the awk command. –  TimP Jun 18 at 21:23
up vote 1 down vote

This worked for me:

awk -F"\t" '$3 == "76" { printf "./build.oct %d %d\n", $1, $2}' \
../benchmark/*/labels.txt | bash
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Because the awk output is interpreted as shell code, you may want to sanitise your input. Replacing the %s with %d would make it safer in the event someone has managed to sneak a ;rm -rf / in the input files. –  Stéphane Chazelas Jun 18 at 8:55
    
@StéphaneChazelas Good point, I edited my answer, thanks –  chaos Jun 18 at 9:02
up vote 0 down vote

Assuming that columns 1 and 2 won't have whitespace in its entries, you can also do:

awk -F"\t" '$3 == "76" { print $1"\t"$2}' ../benchmark/*/labels.txt |
    while read a b; do ./build.oct $a $b; done
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