Question

I’ve a file like this:

 "text I don't know" command other "text" 
 "some" different text "type"

I need to obtain “text I don’t know” and “some”, with sed, awk or whatever bash tool, to be piped to another command.

Any hint?

Answer 1

This seems overly simple, which means you may be new to awk. Which is perfectly acceptable, or I misintreprted your question. I hope its the former.

The following should do what you ask. Setting the field separator to ” -F\" (escape the ” with ) and printing the second field, the first being to the left of “, or nothing. You can just put a pipe and the end of the line to do what you want.

awk -F\" '{print FS$2FS}' inputFile.txt

“text I don’t know”
“some”

FS is Field Seperator