gawk construct to build a line from each 3 lines

We got the output from “sar -ruq” in a file, we stored in sar2.txt, and it looks like this:

11:44:51 633773 22954346
4 1 3 93
0.0 0 0.0 0
11:44:56 633773 22954288
2 2 1 94
0.0 0 0.0 0
11:45:01 632206 22786120
13 18 13 56
9.0 20 0.0 0
11:45:06 625509 22462685
53 47 0 0
5.0 99 0.0 0

So we want to plot it in excel, we need one line per sample, much like this:

11:45:06 625509 22462685 53 47 0 0 5.0 99 0.0 0
11:45:11 628749 22770298 59 41 0 0 4.8 100 0.0 0
11:45:16 630432 22733837 55 45 0 0 6.8 100 0.0 0

So we wrote a small gawk expression to do it:

gawk 'ORS=NR%3?" ":"n"' sar2.txt

So simple, we’re using the modulus function here to do the job. Coming to a blog near you!