use shell to iterate through a file

Question

I have two input files. One has namelist, mm:dd form, duration of usage and other host name stuff in each line. The other one is the one that I generated that has a set of namel

Answer 1

I thought this was what you wanted (uses GNU awk 4.* for true multi-dimensional arrays):

$ cat tst.awk
{
    n = split($9,t,/[()+:]/)
    hours = t[n-3]*24 + t[n-2] + t[n-1]/60
    tot[$4][$1] += hours
}
END {
    for (month in tot) {
        print "["month"]"
        for (user in tot[month]) {
            print user, tot[month][user] "hours"
        }
    }
}

$ awk -f tst.awk file
[Dec]
sdou 166.617hours
ermartin 1.31667hours

but the output numbers don't match your expected values:

[Dec]
sdou 94.xxxhours
ermartin 1.19hours

I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out why they're different but I can't. Sorry, hope this helps anyway.