Using awk to Work with CSV files in the Command Line Terminal
Written by Guillermo Garron
Date: 2012-04-02 17:15:00 00:00
I work a lot on the terminal, either on my Linux or Mac computers, and when I need to work with CSV files, awk is a very good ally.
Let's say you have a file like this one:
Linux, Mac OS X, Windows XP, Windows 8
Ubuntu, iOS, Windows Mobile, Blackberry OS
Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, Blackberry Browser
And let's say you want to print only column 2 of that file, here is how:
awk -F "," '{print $2 }' filename.csv
And if you want to print two columns at once:
awk -F "," '{print $1, $3 }' filename.csv
Column 1 and 3 in this case.
If you separator is not a command, and it is let's say a pipe, just do something like this:
awk -F "|" '{print $1, $3 }' filename.csv