Select row and element in awk

Question

I learned that in awk, $2 is the 2nd column. How to specify the ith line and the element at the ith row and jth column?

Answer 1

To print the columns with a specific string, you use the // search pattern. For example, if you are looking for second columns that contains abc:

awk '$2 ~ /abc/'

... and if you want to print only a particular column:

awk '$2 ~ /abc/ { print $3 }'

... and for a particular line number:

awk '$2 ~ /abc/ && FNR == 5 { print $3 }'