Hi,
I am trying to connect multiple lines comming form a command into a single line, the net effect i am trying to acheive is to transpose a column into a row.

Here is the input text, coming from Top:
CPU TTY PID USERNAME %WCPU %CPU COMMAND
3 ? 20339 user1 6.41 6.40 myprocess1
2 ? 20343 user1 2.41 2.41 myprocess2
2 ? 20332 user1 1.82 1.82 myprocess3
2 ? 20337 user1 0.69 0.69 myprocess4

(edited to save you the clutter)

So what I want t achieve is to get the %CPU usage per process. The script I am writing will execute periodically and the end output should be something like

Time myprocess1 myprocess2 myprocess3
t1 % % %
t2 % % %
etc
i.e. each run of the script will add a new row to the log file.
(and if you must know, it will then be plot using excel)

There can be many clumsy solutions, but I am looking for the shortest, least CPU-using one. I also have perl option, but I am not much of a perl scripter.
I am also open to other methods all together to acheive the same result.
Any ideas?

Maybe you can share your script and some elegant solution can be derived from it