How to print specific columns from file using bash?

Question

I have file which context is as follows:

               CA Services Status Report

           Component Name               Pid        Status
------------------------------------  -------  --------------
WAAE Web Server (ASD)                   20841  running
WAAE Application Server (ASD)           20281  running
WAAE Scheduler (ASD)                    20486  running
WAAE Agent (WA_AGENT)                   20109  running
CA-wcc-services Server                  22385  running
CA-wcc Server                           24410  running

And i wanted to print only Pids on the screen.

I tried using awk and grep but unable to print Pids.

cat test | awk '{print $5}'

I want to print only the Pid column but unable to print it exactly.

Are your columns tab separated or just spaces?

anubhava
– anubhava

2019-10-11 06:16:46 +00:00
Commented Oct 11, 2019 at 6:16 — anubhava
– anubhava, Commented Oct 11, 2019 at 6:16

RavinderSingh13 · Accepted Answer · 2019-10-11 14:18:33Z

5

Could you please try following(tested with provided samples).

awk 'NF && !/Report/ && !/Status/ && !/^-/{print $(NF-1)}' Input_file

OR(as per James sir's comment):

awk 'NF&&$(NF-1)~/[0-9]+/{print $(NF-1)}' Input_file

edited Oct 11, 2019 at 14:18

answered Oct 11, 2019 at 6:22

RavinderSingh13

135k14 gold badges61 silver badges100 bronze badges

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

3 Comments

James Brown Over a year ago

$(NF-1) is the best. Maybe reduce it to: awk 'NF&&$(NF-1)~/[0-9]+/{print $(NF-1)}' file

anubhava Over a year ago

Clever use of $(NF-1) ++

Santosh Garole Over a year ago

@RavinderSingh Thanks for the your inputs. Please let me know what should we do if need to display only third column i.e. status of services. just like running or not running.

James Brown · Accepted Answer · 2019-10-11 06:27:54Z

2

If you only have digits in the pid field, extract the digits:

$ awk 'match($0,/[0-9]+/){print substr($0,RSTART,RLENGTH)}' file
20841
20281
...

Or use more-than-one space as field-separator after record 4:

$ awk -F"  +" 'NR>=5{print $2}' file
20841
20281
...

edited Oct 11, 2019 at 6:27

answered Oct 11, 2019 at 6:18

James Brown

37.7k8 gold badges52 silver badges64 bronze badges

Comments

anubhava · Accepted Answer · 2019-10-11 06:21:29Z

1

You may use this awk assuming file has only spaces and digits may appear anywhere in a line:

awk '!n && n=index($0, " Pid "){++n} n{s=substr($0, n); sub(/ .*/, "", s); print s}' file

answered Oct 11, 2019 at 6:21

anubhava

790k67 gold badges603 silver badges671 bronze badges

Comments

Amadan · Accepted Answer · 2019-10-11 06:23:54Z

1

Since you seem to have a fixed layout, just measure where things are:

<file tail +5 a.txt | cut -c41-45

Start with 5th line, take only characters from 41th to 45th column. Same with AWK (though I find the above more intuitive):

awk 'NR>=5 { print substr($0, 41, 5) }' file

answered Oct 11, 2019 at 6:23

Amadan

200k23 gold badges253 silver badges321 bronze badges

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

How to print specific columns from file using bash?

4 Answers 4

3 Comments

Comments

Comments

Comments

Your Answer

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

4 Answers 4

3 Comments

Comments

Comments

Comments

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest

Related