bash: shortest way to get n-th column of output

Question

Let\'s say that during your workday you repeatedly encounter the following form of columnized output from some command in bash (in my case from executing svn st

Answer 1

Because you seem to be unfamiliar with scripts, here is an example.

#!/bin/sh
# usage: svn st | x 2 | xargs rm
col=$1
shift
awk -v col="$col" '{print $col}' "${@--}"

If you save this in ~/bin/x and make sure ~/bin is in your PATH (now that is something you can and should put in your .bashrc) you have the shortest possible command for generally extracting column n; x n.

The script should do proper error checking and bail if invoked with a non-numeric argument or the incorrect number of arguments, etc; but expanding on this bare-bones essential version will be in unit 102.

Maybe you will want to extend the script to allow a different column delimiter. Awk by default parses input into fields on whitespace; to use a different delimiter, use -F ':' where : is the new delimiter. Implementing this as an option to the script makes it slightly longer, so I'm leaving that as an exercise for the reader.

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Usage

Given a file file:

1 2 3
4 5 6

You can either pass it via stdin (using a useless cat merely as a placeholder for something more useful);

$ cat file | sh script.sh 2
2
5

Or provide it as an argument to the script:

$ sh script.sh 2 file
2
5

Here, sh script.sh is assuming that the script is saved as script.sh in the current directory; if you save it with a more useful name somewhere in your PATH and mark it executable, as in the instructions above, obviously use the useful name instead (and no sh).