How to extract only first column from the file

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Dear All,

I have a file name pointer.unl. It's contains the information below:

O|A|4560333089|PBS|AU1|01/04/2003|30/04/2006|D|IGCD|
O|A|4562222089|PBN|AU1|01/02/2006|31/01/2008|D|04065432|
O|A|3454d00089|PKR|AU1|01/03/2008||R|sdcdc|

I only need to extract first column only which is the "O" column.

I tried command below;

1-awk '{print $1}' filename

  • but it display all the column

2-awk 'Begin {OFS="|"} {print $1}' filename

  • still showing all the column

3- awk -F| '{print $1}' filename > outfilename

  • still display all the file comlum

Appreciate if somebody can assist me.

Rgrds

Shahril

2

Not the most elegant solution... (but this is the first time I've been able give an answer on this forum)

cat unix |sed 's/\|/ /'|awk '{print $1}'
3

Well it work now. Thank for you help.

Can you explain on your solution given?

why need to use 'sed'?

4

Try using:

awk -F\| '{print $1}'

otherwise,

awk -F"|" '{print $1}'

Tell us if that works for you.

5

Well I don't know why the awk statement isn't working, I'm hoping someone will enlighten us both on that matter, but the sed statement is removing the | from each line. It would work just as well to use

cat unix |tr "|" " "|awk '{print $1}'

this also replaces all of the |'s with whitespace

I think that if you escape (put a \) in front of the | in your original awk statement that will work as well

cat unix |awk -F\| '{print $1}'
6 
awk -F"|" '{print $1}' <filename>
7

I think this should work:

cat unix | awk -F\| '{print $1}'

..... reason is "|" being an alpha numeric character (like *,?,%,^,$) would require a "\" before that to tell the Kernel to not use "|" as a function..

8

Using sed,

sed 's/|.*$//' filename

Thanks
Penchal

9

Hercu,

Yup the command is working fine. I miss the -F"|" that why it's not work.

thanks everyone.

10

Hercu and DecoTwc

Yup the command is working fine. I miss the -F"|" that why it's not work.

thanks everyone.

11

anytime!

you can also use cut comamnd to get the same reuklt. I guess the command would be:

cat unit | cut -d"|" -f0

Cheers

12

Why do you guys want to use sed or awk when a simple cut(1) will do ?

cut -d '|' -f 1 file