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csvunixcommandcut

Print first, penultimate and last fields in CSV file

I have big comma separated file with 20000 row and five column, I want to extract particular column, but there are more values so more comma, except header, so how to cut such column.

example file:

name,v1,v2,v3,v4,v5
as,"10,12,15",21,"12,11,10,12",5,7
bs,"11,15,16",24,"19,15,18,23",9,3

This is my desired output:

name,v4,v5
as,5,7
bs,9,3

I tried following cut command but doesn't work

cut -d, -f1,5,6
Solution

  • In general, for these scenarios is best to use a proper csv parser. You can find those in Python, for example.

    However, since your data seems to have fields with commas just in the very beginning, you can decide to print the first field and then the penultimate and last one:

    $ awk 'BEGIN{FS=OFS=","} {print $1, $(NF-1), $NF}' file
name,v4,v5
as,5,7
bs,9,3