$RANDOM from file

[krammer]

After the last post, I was interested in playing around with "awk." What I am trying to do now is choose a random number, and have "awk" use that random number for the line it will chose from a text file. What is happening is I am getting a constant loop of the whole text file...I got the code from "

http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/randomvar.html"...is

it the count that is doing this?

#!/bin/bash


MAXCOUNT=10
count=1
while [ "$count" -le $MAXCOUNT ] 
do
number=$RANDOM
NAME=$(cat /home/eric/names | /usr/bin/awk '{print $number}')
echo $NAME

done

 

[PHV]

In your shell man pages have a look at quoting.
Furthermore: man awk

Hope This Helps, PH.
FAQ219-2884
FAQ181-2886

 

[p5wizard]

Well, you aren't counting at all. So congratulations on your first[green]?[/green] infinite loop. ;-)


HTH,

p5wizard

 

[krammer]

Yeah I didn't really want to count lol...

PHV - Single quotes are stronger than double quotes...That's all I really found when researching them...but I did play around with it. This works, and is what I was trying to do...but I don't know if its the best way or why it really works with the single quotes:

RANGE=10
number=$RANDOM
let "number %= $RANGE"
NAME=$(cat /home/eric/names | /usr/bin/awk {'print $'$number''})
echo "$NAME"

 

[columb]

Just for us UUOC pedants try

NAME=$(/usr/bin/awk '{print $'$number'}' /home/eric/names)

On the internet no one knows you're a dog

Columb Healy

 

[krammer]

It was useless wasn't it...thanks!

 

[krammer]

Replacing this:

NAME=$(/usr/bin/awk '{print $'$number'}' /home/eric/names)

With this:

NAME=$(awk 'NR=='$number+1'{print;exit}' /home/eric/names)

Is much more accurate for how my text file is formatted, and it fixes getting numbers 1-10, instead of 0-9.