title: Processing a tab delimited file with shell script processing
body: <p>normally I would use Python/Perl for this procedure but I find myself (for political reasons) having to pull this off using a bash shell.</p>
  
  <p>I have a large tab delimited file that contains six columns and the second column is integers. I need to shell script a solution that would verify that the file indeed is six columns and that the second column is indeed integers. I am assuming that I would need to use sed/awk here somewhere. Problem is that I'm not that familiar with sed/awk. Any advice would be appreciated.</p>
  
  <p>Many thanks!
  Lilly </p>