19990706: another GEMPAK raw data question

>From: address@hidden
>Organization: .
>Keywords: 199907091514.JAA29497

>Steve,
>
>After I figured out that awk on Solaris is old "awk" and
>won't accept -v, and used nawk instead..it works great.
>I wonder if you could help with an awk question, that I
>can't find the answer to in my awk book (a rather poor one).
>Since the data is transmitted so many times, I get a lot of
>repetitious data, is there a way to tell awk to only find
>the requested pattern a set number of times?, say two or
>three to allow for the "NIL" lines?
>
>Thanks
>Robert
>
>

Robert,

You can put a counter in, and increment it after a non-NIL
bulletin. Then test the counter on the original comparison line, eg:

#!/bin/csh -f

set ASTN=72403
set PART=PPDD
set FILE=/shemp/data/ldm/upperair/199907091?_upa.wmo

awk -v ASTN=${ASTN} -v PART=${PART} -v COUNT=0 \
   'index($0,ASTN) != 0 && index($0,PART) != 0 && COUNT == 0 { print \
   while(index($0,"=") == 0) \
      { getline; print $0 } \
   if(index($0,"NIL") == 0) {COUNT = COUNT + 1} \
   printf "\n" \
   }' $FILE


The above will still print out NIL lines and only increment COUNT when
the "=" line doesn't have NIL in it. You can suppress the output of the
NIL lines in the top pattern matching line by adding "&& index($0,"NIL") == 0".

Steve Chiswell