How to go through a file 1 line at a time

[nroberts420]

I'm not sure how to go to a file one line at a time so I could use data on each line to make an average. What would be the best command to use to do this, and is it possible to use a for loop to count through a file one line at a time?

 

[tikual]

for loop is a suitable way.

 

[pmurray99]

#!/bin/ksh

while read -- line
do
set -- $line # this loads $1 $2 .. with each field in $line
do some stuff
done < MyFile

You can also get the individual fields like this

while read -- f1 f2 f3

All this assumes that the field separater in the file is white space. If not, you'll need to change IFS to the files field separater.

 

[PHV]

You can also consider awk (man awk)

Hope This Help
PH.

 

[jad]

if file is:

hello1    1.0    2.0    3.0
hello3    4.2    3.4
hello19   9.1    2.7    4.3    3.0

you could do awk with:

awk 'BEGIN {n=0;m=0} {for (i=2;i<=NF;i++){n+=1; m+=$i}} END {printf(&quot;average %0f\n&quot;,(m/n));}' <file>

which will sum up all but the first word on each line and divide it by the number of objects.