Question

I’m curious if it is possible to retrieve not only the isolated fields using awk, but also a part of the original string that contains multiple adjacent fields and the enclosed delimiters?

For example, when using awk on

foo.bar.baz.test

with the '.' delimiter, and telling awk to extract the fields 2 and 3, I want to be able to retrieve

bar.baz

automatically. I know I can re-construct the part of the string later by hand, but that just does not feel right.

Ideas?

Answer 1

I am not very sure if this is what you want :

kent$  echo "foo.bar.baz.test"|awk  'BEGIN{FS=OFS="."}{print $2,$3}'
bar.baz

EDIT

I need to generalize it to an unknown number of fields (no hardcoding
$2,$3, but everything starting with say $2 till the end – is that
possible?)

see the test below:

kent$  echo "a.b.c.d.e.f.g.h.j.foo.bar"|awk 'BEGIN{FS=OFS="."}{for(i=2;i<=NF;i++)s=i==NF?s $i:s $i OFS;print s}'
b.c.d.e.f.g.h.j.foo.bar