Question

Is bash capable of handling extracting rows and columns from csv files? Hoping I don’t have to resort to python..

My 5-column csv file looks like:

Rank,Name,School,Major,Year
1,John,Harvard,Computer Science,3
2,Bill,Yale,Political Science,4
3,Mark,Stanford,Biology,1
4,Jane,Princeton,Electrical Engineering,3
5,Alex,MIT,Management Economics,2

I only want to extract the 3rd, 4th, and 5th column contents, ignoring the first row, so output looks like:

Harvard,Computer Science,3
Yale,Political Science,4
Stanford,Biology,1
Princeton,Electrical Engineering,3
MIT,Management Economics,2

So far I can only get awk to print out either each row, or each column of my CSV file, but not specific cols/rows like this case! Can bash do this?

Answer 1

Bash solutions;

Using IFS

#!/bin/bash
while IFS=',' read -r rank name school major year; do
    echo -e "Rank\t: $rank\nName\t: $name\nSchool\t: $school\nMajor\t: $major\nYear\t: $year\n"
done < file.csv
IFS=$' \t\n'

Using String Manipulation and Arrays

#!/bin/bash
declare -a arr
while read -r line; do
    arr=(${line//,/ })
    printf "Rank\t: %s\nName\t: %s\nSchool\t: %s\nMajor\t: %s\nYear\t: %s\n" ${arr[@]}
done < file.csv