Often you may want to use awk to print only the first column of a file.
You can use the following basic syntax to do so:
awk -F, '{OFS=",";print $1}' nba_data.csv
This particular example prints only the first column of the CSV file named nba_data.csv.
Here is what the various awk commands do:
- -F, specifies that the input delimiter is a comma.
- OFS=”,” specifies that the printed output delimiter should be a comma
- $1 specifies that only column 1 should be printed
The following example shows how to use this syntax in practice.
Example: How to Use awk to Print First Column of File
Suppose that we have a file named nba_data.csv that contains information about various basketball players.
We can use the cat command to view the contents of this file:
Suppose that we would like to print only the first column of the file.
We can use the following syntax to do so:
awk -F, '{OFS=",";print $1}' nba_data.csv
The following screenshot shows how to use this syntax in practice:
Notice that this prints only the first column from the file, which is the column that contains the team names.
Note that you could also change $1 to a different number to instead print a different column number from the file.
Also note that you can likely leave out the -F, syntax if you’re working with a text file instead because the default delimiter used for input files is one or more spaces.
Related Tutorials
The following tutorials explain how to perform other common tasks in awk:
How to Use awk to Replace newline with Space
How to Use awk to Replace All Occurrences of String in File
How to Use awk to Extract Substring
