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Dec 8th, 2005

Scan text file to find all words of 4 characters or less

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What I am trying to do is to scan a text file word by word and find all words of 4 character or less then output these words to a file, but the problem is I don't know a unix command that can scan the file this way. The Grep command only enable me to find a certain word in a file. Any help is appreciated

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darklord

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Dec 8th, 2005

Re: Scan text file to find all words of 4 characters or less

try awk. This is a start:

Shell Scripting Syntax (Toggle Plain Text)
awk '{ 
       for(i=1;i<=NF;i++) 
       {
         if(length($i)<5) 
         {print $i}
       }
       }'  filename  > newfilename
awk '{ 
       for(i=1;i<=NF;i++) 
       {
         if(length($i)<5) 
         {print $i}
       }
       }'  filename  > newfilename

jim mcnamara

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Dec 9th, 2005

Re: Scan text file to find all words of 4 characters or less

Quote originally posted by jim mcnamara ...

try awk. This is a start:
Shell Scripting Syntax (Toggle Plain Text)
awk '{ 
       for(i=1;i<=NF;i++) 
       {
         if(length($i)<5) 
         {print $i}
       }
       }'  filename  > newfilename
awk '{ for(i=1;i<=NF;i++) { if(length($i)<5) {print $i} } }' filename > newfilename

Thank you.

Taking this step further. How can I filter out these 4 or less characters words, so that the newfilename only contain palindromes words?

darklord

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Dec 12th, 2005

Re: Scan text file to find all words of 4 characters or less

We are now clearly doing homework.

This is the limit of help->
1. redirect the output of the awk script into a loop instead of into a file.

Shell Scripting Syntax (Toggle Plain Text)
for word in `awk script above`
do
 
done
for word in `awk script above`
do

done

the part between do ... done is now yours.
read the man page for rev, and learn how to compare two strings in an if statement.
use one string for the original version of the $word variable, and reverse another.

jim mcnamara

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