Unable to separate semi-colon separated line awk

Question

I am trying to do the following:

1. Read a file line by line.
2. Each line has the following structure: field1;field2;field3
3. Use

Answer 1

Your awk has no idea what --field-separator=";" means so when you do this:

awk --field-separator=";" '{print $1}'

your awk is still using the default FS of a space, and so $1 contains your whole input line while $2 and $3 are empty. Use -F';' to set the FS.

You are WAY, WAY off the mark in how to write the script you want. If you tell us more about what "process each field" is, we can help you.