Hello all, I have a most complex problem.

I have a file with many entries of the format :

option1|option2|nonsense|rubbish:unuseful_data [option3]: useless_info=[option4]


My question is: Is it possible to pick out options 1-4 into a single file for further processing?

Thanks
Khoom

awk -F '[\\|\\[\\]]' '{print $1,$2,$5,$7}'

Hi

Can you plz explain how is it working.

FS is the input field separator (see Specifying how Fields are Separated ). The value is a single-character string or a multi-character regular expression that matches the separations between fields in an input record.