Help with awk command, pleeeeze!

[bhill4]

Hello all,
I am trying to read a series of 50 text files, called

filename01A.txt
filename02A.txt
filename03A.txt
.. etc, up to
filename57A.txt

These files are long, but there is one occurance of the phrase "[distance]" and I want to grab the 12 characters (..not the 13th..etc) that follow to the right of the phrase "[distance]" and put that data into a file called "output.txt" as a new line of text.

However, right now, I can at least get a new file called "output.txt" to be made, but the data is crap... here is what I have:

ben@ben-VB: ~/Desktop/TEST$ for filename in *; do awk '$0 ~ "[steps]" {print $0}' "$filename" > "output.txt"; done

Any suggestions?

 

[p5wizard]

[tt]> one occur[red]e[/red]nce of the phrase "[distance]"
> awk '$0 ~ "[steps]"[/tt]

[distance], [steps], ... what is it exactly you're looking for?


HTH,

p5wizard

 

[bhill4]

SORRY!!! "[steps]" should read "[distance]

 

[p5wizard]

Kind of tricky on the [ and ] which need escaping because they have special meaning for REs

awk '/\[distance\]/{
 sub(".*\\[distance\\]","",$0)
 print substr($0,1,12)
} filename???.txt

HTH,

p5wizard