How to get the first column of every line from a CSV file?

bash shell csv awk text-parsing
Junba Tester picture Junba Tester · Jul 26, 2012 · Viewed 73k times · Source

How do get the first column of every line in an input CSV file and output to a new file? I am thinking using awk but not sure how.

Answer

Levon picture Levon · Jul 26, 2012

Try this:

 awk -F"," '{print $1}' data.txt

It will split each input line in the file data.txt into different fields based on , character (as specified with the -F) and print the first field (column) to stdout.

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