Parsing the first column of a csv file to a new file

Question

Operating System: OSX Method: From the command line, so using sed, cut, gawk, although preferably no installing modules.

Essentially I am trying to take the first c

Answer 1

I copy-pasted your sample input, saved it as in.csv, and then ran your first line,

awk -F"," '{print $1}' in.csv > out.txt

and it worked perfectly, like so:

$ emacs in.csv
$ cat in.csv 
EXAMPLEfoo,60,6
EXAMPLEbar,30,6
EXAMPLE1,60,3
EXAMPLE2,120,6
EXAMPLE3,60,6
EXAMPLE4,30,6
$ awk -F"," '{print $1}' in.csv > out.txt
$ cat out.txt 
EXAMPLEfoo
EXAMPLEbar
EXAMPLE1
EXAMPLE2
EXAMPLE3

This is in Terminal.app on OS X 10.5