Extracting a portion of data from a very large tab delimited text file

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi All

I wanted to know how to effectively delete some columns in a large tab delimited file.

I have a file that contains 5 columns and almost 100,000 rows

3456 f g t t
3456 g h
456   f  h
4567 f g h z
345   f g
567   h j k l

This is a very large data file and tab delimited.

I need to extract the rows that have values in all the 5 columns. At present, there are several rows that contain only 3 values.

please let me know the best way to extract the rows with all 5 values

Thanks.
LA

2 
awk 'NF==5' file > newfile
3

If Franklin52's solution does not work, perhaps it is because there are always five fields (four tabs delimiting possibly empty fields). In that case, you could try:

awk -F'\t' '{for (i=1;i<=NF;i++) if (!length($i)) next; print}' file

Regards,
Alister