Printing the nth word or column in a file or line

We may have a file having a number of columns, and only a few will actually be useful. For example, in a list of students in an order of their scores, we want to get, for instance, the fourth highest scorer. In this recipe, we will see how to do this.

How to do it...

The most widely-used method is to use awk for doing this task. It can be also done using cut.

1. To print the fifth column, use the following command:

   $ awk '{ print $5 }' filename
   

2. We can also print multiple columns and insert our custom string in between columns.

   For example, to print the permission and filename of each file in the current directory, use the following set of commands:

   $ ls -l | awk '{ print $1 " :  " $8 }'
   -rw-r--r-- :  delimited_data.txt
   -rw-r--r-- :  obfuscated.txt
   -rw-r--r-- :  paste1.txt
   -rw-r--r-- :  paste2.txt
   

See also

• The Using awk for advanced text processing recipe in this chapter explains the awk command

• The Column-wise cutting of the file with cut recipe in...