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$ col() { awk '{print $'$(echo $* | sed -e 's/ /,$/g')'}'; }
April 5, 2012, 11:36 p.m.
—
Janos
Explanation
Something I do a lot is extract columns from some input where cut is not suitable because the columns are separated by not a single character but multiple spaces or tabs. So I often do things like:
... | awk '{print $7, $8}'
... which is a lot of typing, additionally slowed down when typing symbols like '{}$ ... Using the simple one-line function above makes it easier and faster:
... | col 7 8
How it works:
- The one-liner defines a new function with name
col
- The function will execute
awk, and it expects standard input (coming from a pipe or input redirection)
- The function arguments are processed with
sed to use them with awk: replace all spaces with ,$ so that for example 1 2 3 becomes 1,$2,$3, which is inserted into the awk command to become the well formatted shell command: awk '{print $1,$2,$3}'
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