How to get the second column from command output?

Question

My command\'s output is something like:

1540 \"A B\"
   6 \"C\"
 119 \"D\"

The first column is always a number, followed by a space, then a

Answer 1

You don't need awk for that. Using read in Bash shell should be enough, e.g.

some_command | while read c1 c2; do echo $c2; done

or:

while read c1 c2; do echo $c2; done < in.txt