Applying Unix's Head on AWK Through Find Command

Question

I want to output top 10 lines of AWK command in the list of files given by find, using this snippet:

$ find . -name "*.txt" -print -exec awk '$9 != ""'  \| head -n10 {} \;

Note also that I want to print out the file names being processed.

But why I get such error:

awk: cmd. line:2: fatal: cannot open file `|' for reading (No such file or directory)
./myfile.txt

What's the right way to do it?

I tried without backslash before the pipe. Still it gave an error:

find: missing argument to `-exec'
head: cannot open `{}' for reading: No such file or directory
head: cannot open `;' for reading: No such file or directory

Answer 1

If you want to run an Awk program on every file from find that only prints the first 10 lines each time.

$ find . -name "*.txt" -print -exec awk '$9 != "" && n < 10 {print; n++}' {} \;

Answer 2

When running a command with find's -exec, you don't get all the nice shell things like the pipe operator (|). You can regain them by explicitly running a subshell if you like though, eg:

find . -name '*.txt' -exec /bin/sh -c "echo a text file called {} | head -n 15" \;

Answer 3

Based on Ashawley's answer:

find . -name "*.txt" -print -exec awk '$9 != "" {print; if(NR > 9) exit; }' {} \;

It should perform better, as we exit awk after the 10th record.

Answer 4

Using awk only should work:

find . -name "*.txt" -print -exec awk '{if($9!=""&&n<11){print;n++}}' {} \;

Answer 5

You can do it this way too:

find . -name '*txt' -print -exec awk 'BEGIN {nl=1 ;print FILENAME} $9 !="" {if (nl<11) { print $0 ; nl = nl + 1 }}' {}  \;

without head.