Changing awk delimiter and processing CSV files
One of the functions of awk is to split line of data by white spaces and extract only the desired parts. As such this tool is very suitable for handling comma separated values (CSV) files. The only problem is that CSV files use various delimiters - commas, semi columns, pipes and so on. So to make awk split by our desired delimiter, we just use the -F option:
awk -F, - split by comma
awk -F\; - split by semi column
awk -F\| - split by pipe and so on
The snippet bellow searches for the word test in the second column of pipe delimited CSV file
cat file.csv | awk -F\| '{print $2}' | grep test
Post a comment (fixed now)
Comments:
alphaniner (25-04-2012 06:15) :
Don't pipe cat to awk, run awk directly on the file:
awk -F\| '{print $2}' file.csv
The same is true of grep, sed, and other commands: they can read files just fine without the help of cat.
This page was last modified on 2012-05-18 01:33:45