Interview › Scripting (Bash, Groovy)
How do you extract a specific column from delimited text with cut and with awk? [Intermediate]
Answer
With cut, use -d to choose the delimiter and -f to choose fields. With awk, set the field separator using -F and print the desired field variables like $1 or $3.
Technical explanation
cut is straightforward for single-character delimiters and fixed field positions.
awk handles multiple conditions, output formatting, and more complex parsing.
For CSV with quoted delimiters, neither simple cut nor basic awk is enough; use a CSV-aware parser.
Hands-on example
# /etc/passwd fields are colon-delimited.
cut -d: -f1,3 /etc/passwd
awk -F: '{print $1, $3}' /etc/passwd
# Access log: print IP and status if status is 500.
awk '$9 == 500 {print $1, $9}' access.log
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