performance issues in shell script - bash

Question

I have a 200 MB tab separated text file with millions of rows. In this file, I have a column with multiple locations like US , UK , AU etc.
Now I want to break this file on the basis of this column. Though this code is working fine for me, but facing performance issue as it is taking more than 1 hour to split the file into multiple files based on locations. Here is the code:
#!/bin/bash
read -p "Please enter the file to split " file
read -p "Enter the Col No. to split " col_no
#set -x
header=`head -1 $file`
cnt=1
while IFS= read -r line
do
if [ $((cnt++)) -eq 1 ]
then
echo "$line" >> /dev/null
else
loc=`echo "$line" | cut -f "$col_no"`
f_name=`echo "file_"$loc".txt"`
if [ -f "$f_name" ]
then
echo "$line" >> "$f_name";
else
touch "$f_name";
echo "file $f_name created.."
echo "$line" >> "$f_name";
sed -i '1i '"$header"'' "$f_name"
fi
fi
done < $file
The logic applied here is that we are reading the entire file only once, and depending on the locations, we are creating and appending the data to it.
Please suggest necessary improvements in the code to enhance its performance.
Following is a sample data and is separated by colon instead of tab. The country code is in the 4th column:
ID1:ID2:ID3:ID4:ID5
100:abcd:TEST1:ZA:CCD
200:abcd:TEST2:US:CCD
300:abcd:TEST3:AR:CCD
400:abcd:TEST4:BE:CCD
500:abcd:TEST5:CA:CCD
600:abcd:TEST6:DK:CCD
312:abcd:TEST65:ZA:CCD
1300:abcd:TEST4153:CA:CCD

Answer 1

There are a couple of things to bear in mind:
Reading files using while read is slow
Creating subshells and executing external processes is slow
This is a job for a text processing tool, such as awk.
I would suggest that you used something like this:
# save first line
NR == 1 {
header = $0
next
}
{
filename = "file_" $col ".txt"
# if country code has changed
if (filename != prev) {
# close the previous file
close(prev)
# if we haven't seen this file yet
if (!(filename in seen)) {
print header > filename
}
seen[filename]
}
# print whole line to file
print >> filename
prev = filename
}
Run the script using something along the following lines:
awk -v col="$col_no" -f script.awk file
where $col_no is a shell variable containing the column number with the country codes.
If you don't have too many different country codes, you can get away with leaving all the files open, in which case you can remove the call to close(filename).
You can test the script on the sample provided in the question like this:
awk -F: -v col=4 -f script.awk file
Note that I've added -F: to change the input field separator to :.

Answer 2

I think Tom is on the right track, but I'd simplify this a little.
Awk is magical in some ways. One of those ways is that it will keep all its input and output file handles open unless you explicitly close them. So if you create a variable containing an output file name, you can simply redirect to your variable and trust that awk will send the data to the place you've specified and eventually close the output file when it runs out of input to process.
(N.B. an extension of this magic is that in addition to redirects, you can maintain multiple PIPES. Imagine if you were to cmd="gzip -9 > file_"$4".txt.gz"; print | cmd)
The following splits your file without adding a header to each output file.
awk -F: 'NR>1 {out="file_"$4".txt"; print > out}' inp.txt
If adding the header is important, a little more code is required. But not much.
awk -F: 'NR==1{h=$0;next} {out="file_"$4".txt"} !(out in files){print h > out; files[out]} {print > out}' inp.txt
Or, because this one-liner is now a bit long, we can split it out for explanation:
awk -F: '
NR==1 {h=$0;next} # Capture the header
{out="file_"$4".txt"} # Capture the output file
!(out in files){ # If we haven't seen this output file before,
print h > out; # print the header to it,
files[out] # and record the fact that we've seen it.
}
{print > out} # Finally, print our line of input.
' inp.txt
I tested these two scripts successfully on the input data you provided in your question. With this type of solution, there is no need to sort your input data -- your output in each file will be in the order in which that subset's records appeared in your input data.
Note: different versions of awk will permit you to open different numbers of open files. GNU awk (gawk) has a limit in the thousands -- significantly more than the number of countries you might have to deal with. BSD awk version 20121220 (in FreeBSD) appears to run out after 21117 files. BSD awk version 20070501 (in OS X El Capitan) is limited to 17 files.
If you're not confident in your potential number of open files, you can experiment with your version of awk usig something like this:
mkdir -p /tmp/i
awk '{o="/tmp/i/file_"NR".txt"; print "hello" > o; printf "\r%d ",NR > "/dev/stderr"}' /dev/random
You can also test the number of open pipes:
awk '{o="cat >/dev/null; #"NR; print "hello" | o; printf "\r%d ",NR > "/dev/stderr"}' /dev/random
(If you have a /dev/yes or something that just spits out lines of text ad nauseam, that would be better than using /dev/random for input.)
I haven't previously come across this limit in my own awk programming because when I've needed to create many many output files, I've always used gawk. :-P