Edit Tab Delimited Text File w/Data for Use w/Gnuplot

[omegacore]

Hello!

I am running ubuntu, I have a copy of open office excel, but I need to edit a tab space delimited text file with my data in it so I can use gnuplot to plot it.

The editing consists of subtracting one column of data from a file, from another column of data in another file. Each row corresponds to another row in another document... There are about 1000 rows so I cannot do this manually. My lab writeup is due in a few hours, this is the last step I need to complete for the analysis!

I know there is a way to write a quick and dirty program that will perform the operation, but my experience with such things is limited to date. So please! Help!

 

[mgb_phys]

Look at awk (eg http://student.northpark.edu/pemente/awk/awk1line.txt ) it's a very simple language for text processing

Print column 1 - column 2 would be something like:
awk '{print $1-$2}' datafile.txt