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

If Perl is an option:

perl -F, -lane 'print $F[0]' in.csv > out.txt

These command-line options are used:

• -n loop around every line of the input file
• -l removes newlines before processing, and adds them back in afterwards
• -a autosplit mode – split input lines into the @F array. Defaults to splitting on whitespace.
• -e execute the perl code
• -F autosplit modifier, in this case splits on ,

@F is the array of words in each line, indexed starting with $F[0]