Return to Revisions

Let's take this as a sample input file:

$ cat file
jim|process1|23
bob|process2|5
jim|process3|7

Now, let's create this shell script:

$ cat script.sh
read -p "Please Enter a UserName: " uname
awk -v n="$uname" -F\| '$1==n{total+=$3} END{printf "Total for %s is %s minutes\n",n,total}' file

As an example, let's sum up the time used by jim:

$ bash script.sh
Please Enter a UserName: jim
Total for jim is 30 minutes

How it works

awk implicitly loops through every line in the input file. This script uses two variables: n which is the user name and total which is the running total of minutes used by user n.

• -v n="$uname"

  This creates an awk variable n and assigns to it the value of the shell variable uname.

• -F\|

  This tells awk to use | as the field separator

• $1==n{total+=$3}

  Every time the first field, $1, matches the user name, n, we increment the total total by the amount of the third field, $3.

• END{printf "Total for %s is %s minutes\n",n,total}

  When we are done reading the file, we print out the result.