Question

I need to remove lines from a file while contents on lines are tab delimited.
– I need to first split the line using tab, then compute the length of the 3rd segment.
– If the length is greater than say 1000, i will remove that line from the file.

I want to use sed and awk, but it’s hard to get a quick start. Anyone can help? 🙂

Thanks a lot in advance!

Answer 1

I figured it out…

awk '{p = split($0,a,"\t"); if (length(a[3]) < 1000) print $0}' test.txt > out.txt

or
awk -F ‘\t’ ‘{if (length($3) < 1000) print $0}’ test.txt > out.txt