Awk/sed: add line numbers to text from within a range

Question

So I have a range, say 2-4. And I have three lines:

first
second
third

I need my output to be:

2 first
3 second
4 third

I'm trying this on BSD (Mac) awk/sed, which seems to be making it harder.

Ah, I meant the question in a more general sense, in that the range given already matches the amount of lines. So if the range were 2-6 then we'd have 5 lines, etc. — Charles, May 25 '16 at 18:14
Then there's no point saying _"I have a range..."_ You simply want to number all lines starting from `N` and that's really trivial... there's a tool that was designed specifically to `n`umber `l`ines. — don_crissti, May 25 '16 at 18:16
Aha, that's true. There's me overcomplicating things again... — Charles, May 25 '16 at 18:17

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered May 25 '16 at 18:35

3

nl is ideally suited:

nl -v2 -p -ba

will start counting from 2 (-v2), ignoring page changes (-p) and numbering all lines (-ba).

answered May 25 '16 at 18:35

Stephen Kitt

cuonglm · Answer 2 · 2016-05-25T18:16:00.737

1

POSIXLY:

awk '{printf("%s %s\n", FNR+1, $0)}' file

If you want to pass parameter:

awk -vn=2 '{printf "%s %s\n", n++, $0}' <file

If you want only the range is produced in case the file is longer than the range:

awk -v s=2 -v e=4 'BEGIN{for(n=s;n<=e;n++)print n}' | paste -d' ' - file

edited May 25 '16 at 18:16

answered May 25 '16 at 18:07

cuonglm

score 1 · Answer 3 · edited May 25 '16 at 18:18

1

With pure bash script?

i=2; cat output.txt | while IFS= read -r line; do
    echo "$i $line"
    i=$((i+1))
done

edited May 25 '16 at 18:18

cuonglm

answered May 25 '16 at 18:15

That's [UUOC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_(Unix)#Useless_use_of_cat), and see also [using while loop to process text considered bad practice in shell](http://unix.stackexchange.com/q/169716/38906). – cuonglm May 25 '16 at 18:18
1

In some limited Linux shells you will must need to use loops to process text, because you will not have any other tools. I now the cat is not necessary, is just an example to be replace with the very specific command the user are executing... But if there is really a output.txt file, they can use something like while ; bla; done – Luciano Andress Martini May 25 '16 at 18:22

3 Answers3