I am not that good with AWK. Is there a simple awk command I could use to get the word "this" from the following text besides using "awk -F ":" '{print $2} | awk -F " " '{print $1}"?

:this is:that is:

ghostdog74, thanks for the quick reply that worked great. i am not sure how it worked. how would i get the word "this" from the following?

echo ":is this:is that:"

it depends on what the word "this" really means. Is it a word you want to find from a string? If that's the case, you can simply search for it.
If not, you should provide a sample of your input and describe more clearly what you are trying to do.

What I have is the output of a time command. What I want is to grab the hours from the line "real" then times the hours by 60 to get the minutes. Then add that to the minutes. To get the total minutes the command ran.

So what I am looking for is a good way to extract the total number of hours and minutes. However some times the output will not show the hours.

Some times it looks like this:
real 1h10m55.46s
user 0m0.00s
sys 0m0.01s

Other times it may be:
real 59m20.32s
user 0m0.00s
sys 0m0.01s