What is awk print $1?

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awk print $1

In this tutorial, we will see about what is meant by awk print $1.

awk is interpreted programming language. It is very powerful and used for text processing.Awk stands for the names of its authors “Aho, Weinberger, and Kernighan”.

awk print $1

As said before, awk can be used for text processing.awk treats tab or whitespace for file separator by default.
Awk actually uses some variables for each data field found.

$0 for whole line
$1 for first field
$2 for second field
$3 for third field
$n for nth field

so here print $1 represents first field in the file.

Let’s understand with the help of an example.

$ cat > sample.txt

This is sample file
Java is programming language.
This is Java tutorial
I know Java very well.

Let’s run the command now

$awk ‘{print $1}’ sample.txt

This
Java
This
I

If you notice awk ‘print $1’ prints first word of each line.
If you use $3, it will print 3rd word of each line.

$awk ‘{print $3}’ sample.txt

sample
programming
Java
Java

Let’s use csv file now for demonstration

$ cat > countries.csv

#Country,Population,Captital
India,10000,Delhi
Nepal,2000,Kathmandu
China,20000,Beijing

Let’s print first column of csv file using awk print $1 command. We need to provide explicit delimeter over here.

$awk -F’,’ ‘{print $1}’ countries.csv

#Country
India
Nepal
China

That’s all about awk print $1 command.

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What is awk print $1?