Text Processing (Grep/Sed/Awk)

Precise Column Extraction with AWK Field Selection

🧩 The Challenge

You need to extract specific columns from a whitespace-separated log file or command output without knowing the exact character indices.

💡 The Fix

Use the AWK print function to isolate individual fields based on their numerical order in each line.

ps aux | awk '{print $2, $11}'

⚙️ Why It Works

By default, AWK treats any sequence of whitespace as a field delimiter and assigns each segment a numeric variable starting from $1.

🚀 Pro-Tip: Use the -F flag to specify a custom delimiter if your data uses commas or colons instead of spaces.

Linux Tips & Tricks | © ngelinux.com | 7/11/2026