Extract specific columns from delimited file using Awk

Question

Sorry if this is too basic. I have a csv file where the columns have a header row (v1, v2, etc.). I understand that to extract columns 1 and 2, I have to do: awk -F \

Answer 1

If Perl is an option:

perl -F, -lane 'print join ",",@F[0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,19,20,21,22,23,24,29,32]'

-a autosplits line into @F fields array. Indices start at 0 (not 1 as in awk)
-F, field separator is ,

If your CSV file contains commas within quotes, fully fledged CSV parsers such as Perl's Text::CSV_XS are purpose-built to handle that kind of weirdness.

perl -MText::CSV_XS -lne 'BEGIN{$csv=Text::CSV_XS->new()} if($csv->parse($_)){@f=$csv->fields();print (join ",",@f[0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,19,20,21,22,23,24,29,32])}'

I provided more explanation within my answer here: parse csv file using gawk