How to get the second column from command output?

shell awk ksh
Qiang Xu picture Qiang Xu · Apr 22, 2013 · Viewed 348.7k times · Source

My command's output is something like:

1540 "A B"
   6 "C"
 119 "D"

The first column is always a number, followed by a space, then a double-quoted string.

My purpose is to get the second column only, like:

"A B"
"C"
"D"

I intended to use <some_command> | awk '{print $2}' to accomplish this. But the question is, some values in the second column contain space(s), which happens to be the default delimiter for awk to separate the fields. Therefore, the output is messed up:

"A
"C"
"D"

How do I get the second column's value (with paired quotes) cleanly?

Answer

Alex picture Alex · Apr 22, 2013

Use -F [field separator] to split the lines on "s:

awk -F '"' '{print $2}' your_input_file

or for input from pipe

<some_command> | awk -F '"' '{print $2}'

output:

A B
C
D

Related questions

How to add text at the end of each line in unix

I am doing certain text processing operations and finally able to get a file something like this india sudan japan france now I want to add a comment in the above file like in the final file it should be …

Read More
How do I print a field from a pipe-separated file?

I have a file with fields separated by pipe characters and I want to print only the second field. This attempt fails: $ cat file | awk -F| '{print $2}' awk: syntax error near line 1 awk: bailing out near line 1 bash: {…

Read More
How do I use shell variables in an awk script?

I found some ways to pass external shell variables to an awk script, but I'm confused about ' and ". First, I tried with a shell script: $ v=123test $ echo $v 123test $ echo "$v" 123test Then tried awk: $ awk 'BEGIN{print "…

Read More