[CentOS] Inquiry:How to compare two files but not in line-by-line basis?

[Les Mikesell]

mark wrote:
> hadi motamedi wrote:
>> On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 12:42 PM, mark <m.roth at 5-cent.us> wrote:
>>
>>> John Doe wrote:
>>>> From: hadi motamedi <motamedi24 at gmail.com>
>>>>> Can you please do me favor and let me know if I can go further and try
>>> for
>>>>> advanced search like finding how many rows inside a file have data that
>>>>> does not start with a zero after the third comma ?
>>>> Something like: awk -F, ' { print $4 } ' | grep -v "^0" | wc -l Use one
>>>> command at a time to see how they work with each other (you might have to
>>>> modify the grep a bit)...
>>> *sigh*
>>>
>>> Drive me crazy, why use multiple commands?
>>>
>>> awk -F 'BEGIN { FS = ","; }{if ( $3 !~ /^0 ) { count++; }} END { print
>>> count }'
>>> filename
>> Sorry . I tried for your proposed procedure , as the followings :
>> #awk -F 'BEGIN { FS = ","; }{if ( $3 !~ /^0 ) { count++; }} END { print
>> count }' HLRSubscriber-20091111173349.csv
>> But my CentOS server didn't return to the prompt . Can you please let me
>> know why it is in an end-less iterated loop ?
>> Thank you in advance
> 
> Syntax error. You wrote
> if ( $3 !~ /^0
> not
> if ( $3 !~ /^0/
> 
> PLEASE: if you ask for help, and someone gives you examples, READ THE MAN PAGES 
> SO THAT YOU KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING. I could have just as well have given you 
> something that would have wiped your system (like system("rm -rf /").

Awk is just too weird for normal people.  I wouldn't even suggest reading that 
manual.  If you can't do what you want with regexps and a pipeline of simpler 
programs, you might as well use perl.

But:
grep -v '^.*,.*,.*,0' filename |wc -l
seems simple enough and says what you mean.

Or:
cut -d, -f4 | grep -v '^0' |wc -l

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com