mjhjmtu

I have a list of hexadecimal number. I would like to check whether they are in sequence or not. That is, they should be consecutive numbers, in increasing order. In other words, there should be an increment of 1 from each line to the next.

Sample list of hexadecimal numbers:

85AF
85B0
85B1
85B2
85B3
85B4
85B5
85B6
85B7
85B8
85B9
85BA
85BB
85BC
85BD
85BE
85BF
85C0

In reality I would have more than 500 numbers to check through.

Desired output:

All numbers are in sequence
 (or)
Numbers are not in sequence.

This is on Solaris, with ksh.

Awk could do this easily if the output was in decimal, but it can't parse hexadecimal numbers (at least standard awk can't, some versions such as GNU awk can). You can use bc to do the conversion. This works on all POSIX systems.

 echo "ibase=16"; cat input.txt; | bc |
awk 'NR==1 origin = $0-1
 $0!=origin+NR print "Out-of-sequence number at line", NR; exit(1)' >&2

As said in another answer, it would be nice to do this in awk, but ancient awk (the one probably available in Solaris) doesn't understand hex numbers.

A fast solution is to use wc -l and some ksh math:

#! /bin/ksh

first="0x$(head -n1 infile)"
last="0x$(tail -n1 infile)"
lines=$(wc -l <infile)

if [[ "$(( last - first + 1 - lines ))" -eq 0 ]]; then
 echo "All numbers are in sequence."
else
 echo "Numbers are not in sequence."
fi

Here is one option:

while read x; do echo $((16#$x)); done <yourfile | awk 's && $1!=s+1exit(1)s=$1'

This shell command will produce an exit status of 1 (on fail) and 0 (on success). This command can be used e.g. in an if-clause like the following to produce the desired output:

if while read x; do echo $((16#$x)); done < yourfile | awk 's && $1!=s+1exit(1)s=$1'
then echo All numbers are in sequence
else echo Numbers are not in sequence
fi

(Note that you have you substitute the name "yourfile" by the file name that contains your hex number sequence.)

You can also omit the shell loop and use GNU awk's option -n to process the hex numbers directly:

if sed 's/^/0x/' <yourfile | awk -n 's && $1+0!=s+1exit(1)s=$1+0'
then echo All numbers are in sequence
else echo Numbers are not in sequence.
fi

Note: sed is used here to create the syntactically expected format for the hex numbers (with leading 0x).

You can use sort with the option -c to check if the input data is sorted:

-c

Check that the single input file is ordered as specified by the arguments and
the collating sequence of the current locale. Output
shall not be sent to standard output. The exit code shall indicate
whether or not disorder was detected or an error occurred. If
disorder (or, with -u, a duplicate key) is detected, a warning
message shall be sent to standard error indicating where the disorder
or duplicate key was found.

So a simple

LC_ALL=C 
sort -c data 2> /dev/null 
&& echo All numbers are in sequence 
|| echo Numbers are not in sequence

would do.

If you'd like strict sequence it can be easy done by produce etalon sequence and compare it with file

[ $(comm --nocheck-order -3 
 <(sed '/S/!d' file) 
 <(printf "%Xn" 
 $(seq $((16#$(sed '/./!d;q' file))) 
 $((16#$(tac file|sed '/./!d;q')))))) ] &&
echo 'Numbers are not in sequence' ||
echo 'All numbers are in sequence'

Just to check if all numbers are hexadecimal:

sed '/^[[:xdigit:] ]*$/!
 s/.*/Numbers are not in sequence: &/
 q
 
 $! d
 s/.*/All numbers are in sequence/' hexadecimal_number.list

• 
  /^[[:xdigit:] ]*$/ check if in line there are hexadecimal symbols and space only (or nothing - empty line)


• 
  ! reverse match, so execute commands in just if there some other symbols than described above


• 
  s/.*/.../;q substitute all line by Numbers are not in sequence than quit script with printing line


• 
  $! d if script didn't execute previous (pattern match) and if line is not last delete it it start with next line


• 
  s/.*/.../ if script reach last line (so all lines match pattern) substitute last line by All numbers are in sequence an print it

Given the input file hexlist.txt, this works in ksh and bash. It uses the numinterval util. If numinterval isn't available, uncomment the faker function:

# fake `numinterval` function
# numinterval() dc ; 

n=; eval printf '%s\n' $(printf '$((16#%sn)) ' $(<hexlist.txt)) | 
numinterval | grep -qw 1 || n=not ; echo All numbers are $n in sequence