Question

I need to print out only one of various consecutive lines with same first field, and the one must be the one with “more fields in its last field”. That means that last field is a set of words, and I need to print the line with more elements in its last field. In case of same number of max elements in last field, any of the max is ok.

Example input:

("aborrecimento",[Noun],[Masc],[Reg:Sing],[Bulk])
("aborrecimento",[Noun],[Masc],[Reg:Sing],[Device,Concrete,Count])
("aborrecimento",[Noun],[Masc],[Reg:Sing],[])
("adiamento",[Noun],[Masc],[Reg:Sing],[])
("adiamento",[Noun],[Masc],[Reg:Sing],[Count])
("adiamento",[Noun],[Masc],[Reg:Sing],[VerbNom])

Example output:

("aborrecimento",[Noun],[Masc],[Reg:Sing],[Device,Concrete,Count])
("adiamento",[Noun],[Masc],[Reg:Sing],[VerbNom])

solution with awk would be nice, but no need of one liner.

Answer 1

generate index file

$ cat input.txt |
sed 's/,\[/|[/g' | 
awk -F'|' '
{if(!gensub(/[[\])]/, "", "g", $NF))n=0;else n=split($NF, a, /,/); print NR,$1,n}
' | 
sort -k2,2 -k3,3nr | 
awk '$2!=x{x=$2;print $1}' >idx.txt

content of index file

$ cat idx.txt
2
5

select lines

$ awk 'NR==FNR{idx[$0]; next}; (FNR in idx)' idx.txt input.txt
("aborrecimento",[Noun],[Masc],[Reg:Sing],[Device,Concrete,Count])
("adiamento",[Noun],[Masc],[Reg:Sing],[Count])

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Note: no space in input.txt