Calculate average of each column in a file

Question

I have a text file with n number of rows (separated by commas) and columns and I want to find average of each column, excluding empty field.

A sample input looks lik

Answer 1

You can use this one-liner:

$ awk -F, '{for(i=1; i<=NF; i++) {a[i]+=$i; if($i!="") b[i]++}}; END {for(i=1; i<=NF; i++) printf "%s%s", a[i]/b[i], (i==NF?ORS:OFS)}' foo
2.5 4.5 4.5

Otherwise, you can save this in a file script.awk and run awk -f script.awk your_file:

{
    for(i=1; i<=NF; i++) {
        a[i]+=$i
        if($i!="") 
            b[i]++}
    } 
END {
    for(i=1; i<=NF; i++) 
        printf "%s%s", a[i]/b[i], (i==NF?ORS:OFS)
}