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I put my hands up to being a complete beginner, so apologies if I'm doing this wrong.

Say I have the following data frame that continues indefinitely horizontally and vertically with negative numbers only in the odd columns:

-1 2 3 4 -5 9 2 3 -4 5 -6 11 

And I want the 2nd, 4th and 6th complete columns (or every even column) and the minus signs only from the 1st, 3rd, and 5th (or every odd column), so I get this:

- 2 4 - 9 3 - 5 - 11 

And eventually end up with this:

-2 4 -9 3 -5 -11 

So I need the values from the even columns unchanged and of the odd columns, if there's a negative value, keep the - only and if there's a positive value, discard it.

Is there a way to do this with awk/sed?

This is about a far as I get:

awk '{ for (i=2;i<=NF;i+=2) $i="" }1' FILE.txt | sed 's/[0-9,.]*//g' 

I have the following data frame that continues indefinitely horizontally and vertically with negative numbers only in the odd columns:

-1 2 3 4 -5 9 2 3 -4 5 -6 11 

And I want the 2nd, 4th and 6th complete columns (or every even column) and the minus signs only from the 1st, 3rd, and 5th (or every odd column), so I get this:

- 2 4 - 9 3 - 5 - 11 

And eventually end up with this:

-2 4 -9 3 -5 -11 

So I need the values from the even columns unchanged and of the odd columns, if there's a negative value, keep the - only and if there's a positive value, discard it.

Is there a way to do this with awk/sed?

This is about a far as I get:

awk '{ for (i=2;i<=NF;i+=2) $i="" }1' FILE.txt | sed 's/[0-9,.]*//g' 

I put my hands up to being a complete beginner, so apologies if I'm doing this wrong.

Say I have the following data frame that continues indefinitely with negative numbers only in the odd columns:

-1 2 3 4 -5 9 2 3 -4 5 -6 11 

And I want the 2nd, 4th and 6th complete columns (or every even column) and the minus signs only from the 1st, 3rd, and 5th (or every odd column), so I get this:

- 2 4 - 9 3 - 5 - 11 

And eventually end up with this:

-2 4 -9 3 -5 -11 

So I need the values from the even columns unchanged and of the odd columns, if there's a negative value, keep the - only and if there's a positive value, discard it.

Is there a way to do this with awk/sed?

This is about a far as I get:

awk '{ for (i=2;i<=NF;i+=2) $i="" }1' FILE.txt | sed 's/[0-9,.]*//g' 

I put my hands up to being a complete beginner, so apologies if I'm doing this wrong.

Say I have the following data frame that continues indefinitely horizontally and vertically with negative numbers only in the odd columns:

-1 2 3 4 -5 9 2 3 -4 5 -6 11 

And I want the 2nd, 4th and 6th complete columns (or every even column) and the minus signs only from the 1st, 3rd, and 5th (or every odd column), so I get this:

- 2 4 - 9 3 - 5 - 11 

And eventually end up with this:

-2 4 -9 3 -5 -11 

So I need the values from the even columns unchanged and of the odd columns, if there's a negative value, keep the - only and if there's a positive value, discard it.

Is there a way to do this with awk/sed?

This is about a far as I get:

awk '{ for (i=2;i<=NF;i+=2) $i="" }1' FILE.txt | sed 's/[0-9,.]*//g'