I know "awk -F:" will separate out the column by ":" , now if I what to separate out the column by space also , what can I do ?


for example :

#ps -ef |grep telnet
root 10159 702 0 15:45 ? 00:00:00 in.telnetd: 192.168.0.1

how to separate out the column so that the column as below,

column 1 --> root
column 2 --> 10159
column 3 --> 702
column 4 --> 0
column 5 --> 15
column 6 --> 45
column 7 --> ?
column 8 --> 00
column 9 --> 00
column 10 --> 00
column 11 --> in.telnetd
column 12 --> 192.168.0.1

|awk {print $12} then output the result is 192.168.0.1 , in short , I want to separate the column , to let the column is separate by : and space at the same time like my above example , is it possible ? thx

ps -ef |grep telnet | tr ":" " " | awk ' { for ( i=1; i<=NF; i++ ) { print $i; }}'

Hi ...

I tried this out in one of my files having the data as below

20051202 07:02:03 07:38:23
20051203 07:01:35 07:33:44
20051204 07:01:39 07:37:41
20051205 07:01:47 07:39:39
20051206 07:01:57 07:40:53
20051207 07:01:49 07:45:16

But it still gives result as below .... it was not taking FS as either space or colon ...

$ awk 'BEGIN{FS="[ :]+"}{print $1}' filename
20051202 07:02:03 07:38:23
20051203 07:01:35 07:33:44
20051204 07:01:39 07:37:41
20051205 07:01:47 07:39:39
20051206 07:01:57 07:40:53

just change awk to nawk and it works fine....

Great .... that worked fine ... thanks a lot ....

i think nawk has the capability of taking regular expressions as field seperator which awk does not have .... am i right ?

from man nawk

FS Input field separator regular expression; a space
character by default.

you are correct.