Question

can I use awk to extract the first column or any column on a string?
Actually i am using a file and reading it to a variable I want to use AWK on that variable and do my job.

How is it possible? Any suggestions.

Answer 1

Print first column*:

<some output producing command> | awk '{print $1}'

Print second column:

<some output producing command> | awk '{print $2}'

etc.

Where <some output producing command> is like cat filename.txt or echo $VAR, etc.

e.g. ls -l | awk '{print $9}' extracts the ninth column, which is like an … awkward way of ls -1

*Columns are defined by the separating whitespace.

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EDIT: If your text is already in a variable, something like:

VAR2=$(echo $VAR | awk '{print $9}')

would work, provided you change 9 to the desired column.