Question

I am using awk to get compute some sums and I want to store them in a file.

here is my input file:

misses 15
hit 18
misses 20
hit 31

And I want to print the total misses, and total hits in a file.

If I run this:

awk 'BEGIN { hits=0; misses=0; } /^hit/{ hits+=$2}; /^misses/{misses+=$2}; END {print "Hits: " hits "\nMisses: " misses }' t.txt 

I see them in the terminal.

Now I want to write the in a file:

I tried this:

#!/bin/bash
 awk 'BEGIN { hits=0; misses=0; } /^hit/{ hits+=$2}; /^misses/{misses+=$2}; END {print "Hits: " hits "\nMisses: " misses }' t.txt

echo misses $misses > $1; #first one overwrites the previous $1 is the argument given in the command line
echo hits $hits>> $1; # all the othes append to the .txt file

but $misses, and $hits do not have value.

I also tried this:

#!/bin/bash
result= $(echo $output | awk 'BEGIN { hits=0; misses=0; } /^hit/{ hits+=$2}; /^misses/{misses+=$2}; END {print "Hits: " hits "\nMisses: " misses }' t.txt )
# $NF if I want the last column
echo $result

that I saw on the web, in order to see what $result will return me but I get this error:

./test2.sh: line 2: Hits:: command not found

Answer 1

hits and misses are only variables inside awk, not in the shell after awk exits. Just do the following:

#!/bin/bash
awk 'BEGIN { hits=0; misses=0; } /^hit/{ hits+=$2}; /^misses/{misses+=$2}; END {print "Hits: " hits "\nMisses: " misses }' t.txt > $1

In your second attempt, you cannot put a space after the ‘=’:

result=$(echo $output | awk 'BEGIN { hits=0; misses=0; } /^hit/{ hits+=$2}; /^misses/{misses+=$2}; END {print "Hits: " hits "\nMisses: " misses }' t.txt )