awk help

[onacadrianro]

i'm new in linux so pls,have mercy ....:
I have to display from the list of files given as parameters the name of the
file with the largest number of words and their number.(with AWK)
pls help me :-s

[stokes]

You don't need awk if you just want to count the number of words in some files. you can use wc -l. for example:

wc -l *.txt
    500 hist.txt
  49612 itinerary.txt
      0 testfile.txt
  50112 total

I would probably avoid awk if you are a brand new linux user unless you specifically want to use it for some reason.

[Schmidt]

It seems he needs to use awk to capture wc's output, like

SZ=`wc -l file.txt | awk '{ print $1; }'`

to get a size of 'file.txt' in variable $SZ. So you would need some kind of a loop in a script, that iterates over file names in current directory and checks its sizes. So here is an example:

FILES=`ls .`

BIGGEST_SZ=0


for NAME in $FILES
do
SZ=`wc -l $NAME | awk '{ print $1; }'`
if [ $SZ -gt $BIGGEST_SZ ]; then
BIGGEST_SZ=$SZ
BIGGEST_NAME=$NAME
fi
done

echo "$BIGGEST_NAME has the biggest size: $BIGGEST_SZ"

Anyway, it looks like a homework