I want to select the first column from a daily file called foo.csv. The result is written to file foo.txt. Currently the following script is used for that:
cut -d, -f 1 foo.csv > foo.txt

A typical result would yield :
A12
A45
B11
B67

What needs to happen in addition is that two columns need to be added before writing to file, namely a code (say 'abc') and the current date, such that a typical result would yield :
abc 2008-05-20 A12
abc 2008-05-20 A45
abc 2008-05-20 B11
abc 2008-05-20 B67

How can this be achieved in particular if the date (column 2) should be today's date?

awk -v d="$(date "+%Y-%m-%d")" '{print "abc", d, $1}' foo.csv > foo.txt

Thank you for your response, it worked very well. A question:

The delimiter you are suggesting is a space. How can this be changed to a comma ','?

And for the record, the full statement needs to be:

cut -d, -f 1 foo.csv | awk -v d="$(date "+%Y-%m-%d")" '{print "abc", d, $1}' >foo.txt

awk is perfectly able to do the job of cut at the same time, so yes, that can be optimized a bit. -F , sets awk's field separator to comma and OFS=FS causes it to use it as the Output Field Separator as well as [Input] Field Separator.

awk -F, -v d="$(date "+%Y-%m-%d")"  '{ OFS=FS; print "abc", d, $1 }' foo.csv >foo.txt

I am having the following problem when executing this script. It currently looks as follows:

awk -F, -v dt="$(date "+%Y-%m-%d")" '{ OFS=FS; print "abc", dt, $1 }' foo.csv > foo.txt

Try with nawk, bawk, mawk, gawk, or XPG4 awk if you have any of those installed on your system.