Finding max value of a specific date awk

Question

I have a file with several rows and with each row containing the following data-

name 20150801|1 20150802|4  20150803|6  20150804|7  20150805|7  20150806|8  2015         


        

Answer 1

You couldn't have taken 5 seconds to give your sample input different values? Anyway, this may work when run against input that actually has different values for the dates:

$ cat tst.awk
BEGIN { FS="[|[:space:]]+" }
FNR==1 {
    for (i=2;i<=NF;i+=2) {
        if ( $i==tgt ) {
            f = i+1
        }
    }
    max = $f
}
$f >= max { max=$f; name=$1 }
END { print name }

$ awk -v tgt=20150801 -f tst.awk file
name2