Select a particular column using awk or cut or perl

Question

I have a requirement to select the 7th column from a tab delimited file. eg:

cat filename | awk \'{print $7}\'

The issue is that the data in th

Answer 1

Judging by the format of your input file, you can get away with delimiting on - instead of spaces:

awk 'BEGIN{FS="-"} {print $2}' filename

• FS stands for Field Separator, just think of it as the delimiter for input.
• Given that we are now delimiting on -, your 7th field before now becomes the 2nd field.
• Save a cat! Specify input file filename as an argument to awk instead.

---

Alternatively, if your data fields are separated by tabs, you can do it more explicitly as follows:

awk 'BEGIN{FS="\t"} {print $7}' filename

And this will resolve the issue since Out Global Doc Mark looks to be separated by spaces.