Stupid awk question

[9704]

In article <3731 at ethz-inf.UUCP> wyle at ethz.UUCP (Mitchell Wyle) writes:
> In article <DMAUSTIN.89Oct10145918 at vivid.sun.com> Darren Austin writes:
> 
> >I am trying to split up a large output file into several
> >smaller files.  The smaller files are named after the value in
> >the second field.  I tried using the following simple awk script,
> > [...]
> >but it fails with 
> >awk: too many output files 10
>
> [...]
> sort +0 | awk '[SCRIPT BY TONY O'HAGAN DELETED]' | /bin/sh
> [...]

If you don't have access to the new AWK, but do have the "bs" command
(mini-language) on your machine, I've found it also works well for
splitting a file into subfiles which are named by a field of the input.
The following bs program should solve Mr. Austin's problem in one process:

#!/bin/bs
#  Split the input into files named by the 2nd field.
outfile = ""
while ?(line = get)
	match (line, "[^\t ]*[\t ]*\([^\t ]*\)")
	if mstring(1) != outfile    open ("put", outfile=mstring(1), "w")
	put = line
next
run

(The open seems to automatically close the previous file)
I don't know how portable this is; bs is available in System V.2 anyway.
Type ^N now for a way to do this in 1 line of PERL, by Mr. Schwartz...   ;-)

					-- Greg Ubben
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