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

[Kam-Hung Soh]

On Fri, 02 May 2008 09:13:35 +1000, John Bartley K7AAY  
<john.bartley@gmail.com> wrote:

> On May 1, 4:02 pm, b...@proulx.com (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>