Is there a way to save a mac terminal output directly to a file?

Question

I am carrying out a research project for which I need to do quite a lot of calculations. I basically calculated a lot of features for structures present in a .sdf file. I automated the entire process and carried it out in the terminal of my mac.

The thing is, there are over 48 rows and about 1500 columns. Manually typing in the data to an excel sheet would be a very strenuous task. I was wondering whether there was any way to directly save all the data into an excel sheet or not.

Whether it is sorted out or not does not matter. I think that the effort put into sorting a file will be quite less than manually making one.

It is being outputted as numbers separated by an indentation. For example,

(9613791)   2.69174 4.00454 4.2916  6.25497 6.65652 6.5094  5.18009 5.15649 5.823377.19567  8.21786 6.99439 16.2414 30.3753 30.6785 32.3146 30.0467 51.6735 25.142149.4748  51.7923 42.1594 52.7151 36.7925 1385.6  2004.66 2277.51 2055.07 2273.911577.31  996.44  2300.92 1986.91 1913.57 1486.7  2496.63 2.45285 3.78492 4.502884.55984  2.82045 2.75078 1.31798 4.53201 4.57725 3.39381 2.39053 3.80041 

(6326464)   6.14815 5.46639 4.81788 6.00802 10.6837 8.52504 7.72782 8.05056 8.8713412.2334  12.8092 7.97405 20.3998 18.8032 25.2747 31.2464 33.5688 42.0236 25.741528.9837  33.9351 40.8985 47.1114 31.8816 752.681 1090.84 1049.61 953.366 1405.21942.868  876.854 1345.75 1178.31 1467.03 1395.57 1371.48 2.67685 3.35145 5.508316.20868  5.91418 4.43033 3.44952 6.23538 5.99355 6.30963 7.03768 6.14026 `

Note: This just a small snippet of the actual output. I could not post the image until I got 10 points. I need to get the data between the two numbers that I put a bracket between in one row. The next row starts from the second number that is between the brackets. There are basically around 1500 columns of such data. As suggested by @deceze in a comment, I will try to alter my program to implement a function that automatically save the data. But is there an alternative method that can help me expedite the process without trying to make changes to my program?

Answer 1

Imagine your mysterious program is called fred and you run it by typing

./fred

in the Terminal. Now, you can make the output get sent into a file called file.txt by running it like this:

./fred > file.txt

Now, you can copy the first 10 lines of the file by running this command:

head -10 file.txt | pbcopy

and then click edit under your question and paste (with Command-V) those first 10 lines in so we can see what you are talking about.

If you just want the first number of every line in that file put into a CSV file called lovely.csv you can do this:

awk '{print $1}' file.txt > lovely.csv

If you want the 9th column from every line, change the $1 above to $9.

If you want the 1st, 2nd and 4th field, use

awk '{print $1,$2,$4}' file.txt > lovely.cv