awk Useful one-liners - calculating average from a CSV etc Selecting specific columns in tabular data
Example
We assume a file using ; as a column delimiter. Selecting a specific set of columns only requires a print statement. For instance, the following program selects the columns 3, 4 and 7 from its input:
awk -F';' -v 'OFS=;' '{ print $3, $4, $7 }'
It is as usual possible to more carefully choose lines to print. The following program selects the columns 3, 4 and 7 from its input when the first field is Alice or Bob:
awk -F';' -v 'OFS=;' '($1 == "Alice") || ($1 == "Bob") { print $3, $4, $7 }'
