Question

Was wondering if someone can help me with this. So I have a text file with 10 lines, a while loop and a counter that starts at 10. For each iteration of the loop, I will decrement it. However for every iteration, I want to extract a line say the 10th line on the first rotation and the 9th line on the second to compare them. Is there a function that say you pass a value to and it extracts a certain line? or some combination of it. Would appreciate the help
Thanks

Answer 1

Pass your line number to awk:

If you have the line number in variable i then:

val=$(awk -v line=$i 'NR==line{print;exit}' filename)

will store the ith line into variable val.