Contents:
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1. Disclaimer
2. How do I install gnumdata ?
3. What is awk?
4. What is the difference between
a data file and an actions file ?
====================================1. Disclaimer
Read at your own risk. The current, previous, or original authors
make no claim as to fitness for any purpose or absence of any errors,
and offer no warranty. Do not neither eat nor drink.
====================================2. How do I install gnumdata ?
Simply copy the gnumdata.awk file on your disk and run it with gawk
on your data files and actions file. For instance if your data file
is test.data just type
gawk -f gnumdata.awk test.data
the program will read test.stm, test.dat and it will tell you
which ouput files you may use. This means of course that you
have gawk installed on your system. If you are using Linux, gawk should
be already inbstalled. For PC/Windows computers, you may get gawk.exe
and its .dll on the gnumdata home page. The awk FAQ hast a lot of web sites
where you can get various awk versions.
====================================3. What is awk?
Awk is a programming language, named after its three original authors,
Alfred V. Aho, Brian W. Kernighan and Peter J. Weinberger.
"Awk is a convenient and expressive programming language that can be
applied to a wide variety of computing and data-manipulation tasks.''
Most implementations of awk are interpreters which read your awk
source program and parse it and act on it directly. Awk has its
own FAQ, and a newsgroup, comp.lang.awk, which can be found
on the Internet:
ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/comp.lang.awk/faq
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/computer-lang/awk/faq
====================================4. What is the difference between a data file and an actions file ?
A data file is a text file which may contain comments preceded by #,
numeric or character values ("data") and a special line,
called the format line (with the X's). The following lines are an example
of a data file
# a simple example
XX XXXX XXXX XX
01 1998 120 1
02 132 1
03 138 1
01 1999 140
02 150 2
An actions file is a text file whose lines describe the action
to perform on the data. For instance one may compute the
numbers of non empty values in column 4, or padd the
empty values of column 2 with the value from previous line
with the action lines
Nbval 4 Score
Prev 2 Year
The computation output file gnumdata.cal will contain the result, which is
Column 4 "Score" number of non empty values : 5
and column 2 of the data output file gnumdata.sor is padded :
# a simple example
XX XXXX XXXX XX
01 1998 120 1
02 1998 132 1
03 1998 138 1
01 1999 140
02 1999 150 2
See the reference card for more options including copying these output files
with specified names.
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