Extract specific columns from delimited file using Awk

Question

Sorry if this is too basic. I have a csv file where the columns have a header row (v1, v2, etc.). I understand that to extract columns 1 and 2, I have to do: awk -F \

Answer 1

Other languages have short cuts for ranges of field numbers, but not awk, you'll have to write your code as your fear ;-)

awk -F, 'BEGIN {OFS=","} { print $1, $2, $3, $4 ..... $30, $33}' infile.csv > outfile.csv

There is no direct function in awk to use field names as column specifiers.

I hope this helps.

Answer 2

You can use a for-loop to address a field with $i:

ls -l | awk '{for(i=3 ; i<8 ; i++) {printf("%s\t", $i)} print ""}'