Often you may want to use Bash to extract the first and last column from a file.
You can use the following syntax to do so:
awk '{print $1, $NF}' team_info.txt
This particular example will extract the first and last column from the file named team_info.txt.
Note that this method uses awk with the $1 and $NF (“number of fields) commands to extract the first and last columns from the file, assuming the delimiter is one or more spaces.
If your file uses a different delimiter, then you can use the -F parameter to specify it.
For example, you could use the following syntax to extract the first and last column from a CSV file:
awk -F, '{OFS=",";print $1,$NF}' team_info.csv
By using -F, we are able to specify that the CSV file uses a comma as a delimiter between the fields.
The following example shows how to use each of these methods in practice.
Example 1: Extract First and Last Column from a Text File
Suppose that we have a text file named team_info.txt that contains information about various basketball teams.
We can use the cat command to view the contents of this file:
We can see that there are three columns in this file.
We can use the following syntax to extract only the first and last column from the file:
awk '{print $1, $NF}' team_info.txt
The following screenshot shows how to use this syntax in practice:
Notice that this returns only the first and last columns from the file.
Example 2: Extract First and Last Column from a CSV File
Suppose that we have a CSV file named team_info.csv that contains information about various basketball players.
We can use the cat command to view the contents of this file:
We can see that there are four columns in this file.
We can use the following syntax to extract only the first and last column from the file:
awk -F, '{OFS=",";print $1,$NF}' team_info.csv
The following screenshot shows how to use this syntax in practice:
Notice that this returns only the first and last columns from the CSV file.
Related Tutorials
The following tutorials explain how to perform other common tasks in Bash:
Bash: How to Align Columns in Output
Bash: How to Sort File by Multiple Columns
Bash: How to Remove Specific Columns from a File
