What is awk print $2

In this tutorial, we will see about what is meant by awk print $2.

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

awk print $2

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 awk print $2 represents second field in the file.

Let’s understand with the help of an example.

Let’s run the command now

If you notice awk print $2 prints second word of each line.
If you use $3, it will print 3rd word of each line.

Let’s use csv file now for demonstration

Let’s print second column of csv file using awk print $2 command. We need to provide explicit delimeter over here.

That’s all about awk print $2 command.