Printing column separated by comma using Awk command line

Question

I have a problem here  I have to print a column in a text file using awk  However  the columns are not separated by spaces at all  only using a single comma  Looks something like this   column1 column2 column3 column4 column5 column6   How would I print out 3rd column using awk

User · Answer

Try this awk  awk -F     0  3 1  file column3      Divide fields by    0  3 Set the line to only field 3 1 Print all out   explained here    This could also be used   awk -F    print  3   file

User · Answer

Try   awk -F      print  3   myfile txt   Here in -F you are saying to awk that use     as field separator

User · Answer

If your only requirement is to print the third field of every line  with each field delimited by a comma  you can use cut   cut -d  -f3 file    -d  sets the delimiter to a comma -f3 specifies that only the third field is to be printed

User · Answer

A simple  although awk-less solution in bash   while IFS   read -r a a a b  do echo   a   done  lt inputfile   It works faster for small files   lt 100 lines  then awk as it uses less resources  avoids calling the expensive fork and execve system calls    EDIT from Ed Morton  sorry for hi-jacking the answer  I don t know if there s a better way to address this    To put to rest the myth that shell will run faster than awk for small files     wc -l file 99 file    time while IFS   read -r a a a b  do echo   a   done  lt file  gt  dev null  real    0m0 016s user    0m0 000s sys     0m0 015s    time awk -F    print  3   file  gt  dev null  real    0m0 016s user    0m0 000s sys     0m0 015s   I expect if you get a REALY small enough file then you will see the shell script run in a fraction of a blink of an eye faster than the awk script but who cares   And if you don t believe that it s harder to write robust shell scripts than awk scripts  look at this bug in the shell script you posted     cat file a b -e d   cut -d  -f3 file -e   awk -F    print  3   file -e   while IFS   read -r a a a b  do echo   a   done  lt file

[csv] Printing column separated by comma using Awk command line

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