Question

I have a file1:

6 
3 
6 
9 
2 
6

This command prints the result:

awk 'NR==1{a=$1};$0!=a' file1
3 
9 
2

Now I have file2:

6 1 2 3 4 5 
3 3 4 4 4 6 
6 5 2 2 5 1 
9 1 3 5 4 1 
2 5 6 4 8 5 
6 1 5 2 3 1

I want to do the same thing, but with file2. I want to print out the result:

3 3 4 4 5 6 
9 5 3 2 8 1 
2 5 6 5 3 1 
    5 4   1 
      2

I want to do it in awk. Thank you for your help.

Answer 1

AWK is not really suited for what you are trying to do, since it is made for processing rows one at a time, while you are trying to shift numbers up and down between different rows. That said, this monster should do what you want:

awk 'NR==1{nc=NF;for(i=1;i<=nc;i++)a[i]=$i}{for(i=1;i<=nc;i++){if($i!=a[i]){v[m[i]++,i]=$i;if(m[i]>nl)nl=m[i]}}}END{for(l=0;l<nl;l++){for(i=1;i<=nc;i++){if(l<m[i]){printf("%d ", v[l,i])}else{printf("  ")}}printf("\n")}}'

If, on the other hand, your matrix of numbers had been transposed, this task would have been far simpler:

awk '{for(i=2;i<=NF;i++)if($i!=$1)printf(" %d",$i);printf("\n")}'