Extract Lines when Column K is empty with AWK/Perl

Question

I have data that looks like this:

foo 78 xxx
bar    yyy
qux 99 zzz
xuq    xyz

They are tab delimited. How can I extract lines where column 2 is

Answer 1

perl -F/\t/ -lane 'print unless $F[1] eq q//' myfile.txt

Command Switches

• -F tells Perl what delimiter to autosplit on (tabs in this case)
• -a enables autosplit mode, splitting each line on the specified delimiter to populate an array @F
• -l automatically appends a newline "\n" at the end of each printed line
• -n processes the file line-by-line
• -e treats the first quoted argument as code and not a filename