Question

This is to be done using AWK:
There is a file called temp.txt and inside this file there are the following contents:
670 12

22 11

There is a line in between those two fields above that you should not count. Your job is to count the number of characters per line(do not count lines that are empty)

and take the average of them and round it down to the nearest whole integer. The numbers can change as well as the empty line positions, so do not hard code.

Answer 1

Please find the following AWK script to count the average characters per line.

Awk Script:

awk -v cmd="$0" '
BEGIN {
   if(ARGC != 2)
   {

     printf("\nUsage: %s< file-name>\n\n", cmd);
     exit
   }
   printf("This script will read the file: %s and prints the average number of characters\n\n", ARGV[1]);
   line = 0;
   totalCharacters = 0;
}

#following pattern checks for any character/spaces but not empty line
/./ {
   if(length($0) >= 1)
   {
#count the numbe of non empty lines
      line = line + 1
#count characters in line and increment it with totalCharacters variable
      totalCharacters = totalCharacters + length($0)
   }
}

END{
if(ARGC == 2)
{
     printf("Number of non-empty lines = %d\n", line);
     printf("Average characters per line = %d\n\n", totalCharacters/line);
}
}'    $1

Ouput: Execute the script as mentioned in below format

USER> avg-line-len.awk temp.txt
This script will read the file: msgs and prints the average number of characters

Number of non-empty lines = 1
Average characters per line = 4

//program execution with no input arguments

USER> ./avg-line-len.awk

Usage: ./avg-line-len.awk <file-name>