Column splitting and separators

You know when you tend to fallback to awk when you want to print a certain column from a multiline file? And we all know you probably don’t even know awk very well. Or at all, except for the column filtering part. Are you that guy, or are you using the posh cut for this job? Enough with the questions. What happens is you’re not confident enough to do is to use bash for this job. And let me tell you this. Bash performs brilliantly at column splitting.

Imagine you need to print the user name and UID number for all entries in /etc/passwd. What turns you around is that you need to split each row by the colon and not the whitespace. To overcome this, use the special variable called IFS (abbreviated from Internal Field Separator) and the read built-in command.

Normally you would do:

IFS=: read FIRST SECOND THIRD OTHERS </etc/passwd
echo $FIRST $THIRD

The IFS value is only passed to the read command and doesn’t affect the current shell environment. That’s because we add it just before the command on the same line. That’s neat, heh?

The code above outputs the first and third columns (username and UID) and of course will work only for the first line in the file. We just need to loop through each line and we’re set for the action:

while IFS=: read FIRST SECOND THIRD OTHERS; do
  echo $FIRST $THIRD
done </etc/passwd

And there you have it. Pure bash power. Loading awk in memory, even from a cached disk location, is a big task. We’re talking about an entire programming language. Would you execute awk or cut if you would write a script in Python? I’m sure you wouldn’t.