Hi everyone,

I am working on mouse heart RNAseq data (paired-end) and using GSNAP aligner. Here is my commandline:

output of GSNAP: sample.bam

On the output of gsnap I use samtools fixmate to fix mate information

samtools fixmate sample.bam sample_unsortfix.bam

run htseq-count on sample_unsortfix.bam (using -f 0x0002 for fetching only alignments that are mapped in proper pair)

samtools view -f 0x0002 sample_unsortfix.bam | htseq-count -s reverse - merged.gtf > sample.counts

On running this command I get the following error:

Error occured when processing SAM input (line 1630237):
  ("Malformed SAM line: MRNM == '*' although flag bit &0x0008 cleared", 'line 1630237')
  [Exception type: ValueError, raised in _HTSeq.pyx:1323]

So I printed out the line 1630237 where error is caused:

samtools view -f 0x0002 sample_unsortfix.bam | awk "NR==1630237{print;exit}"

Line 1630237:

D5N1JJN1:213:C4HW1ACXX:6:1101:16916:99540    355    chr2    174330382    2    1S53M3777N10M35H    *    0    128    GGCTGCAGAAGGACAAGCAGGTCTACCGGGCCACGCACCGCCTGCTGCTGCTGGGTGCTGGAGA    CCFFFFFHHHHHGIIJJJIJJJJJJJJJJJIJJJJJJJJJIJJHHHHHFFFFFEDECBDDDBDC    RG:Z:heart_adultmale    MD:Z:63    NH:i:3    HI:i:2    NM:i:0    SM:i:2    XQ:i:40    X2:i:40    XO:Z:CM    XS:A:-

To remove these lines, I changed my command line to this:

samtools view -f 0x0002 sample_unsortfix.bam | awk '!/\\t\\*\\t/' - | htseq-count -s reverse - merged.gtf > sample.counts

It worked before but now it is not working.

Does anybody know why am I getting this error and how can this be fixed?

UPDATE: I added an extra \ in the awk command before. I removed it and now it is working. This is the new command line that works and fixes the error:

samtools view -f 0x0002 sample_unsortfix.bam | awk '!/\t\*\t/' - | htseq-count -s reverse - merged.gtf > sample.counts

(I have added this as an answer too)