I have a file which is fixed width columns. This is an offset buffer - rather than space or tab delimited. There are upto about 8 columns and I need to get all of the column 5's values into another file.

The problem is that because the delimiter is a space - and some fields are blank - the 5th field is sometimes taken as the 6th - so I lose quite a bit of data.

I want to find a way to output just the values from the 50th - 60th positions on the line into another file - for all lines in a large text file.

Ideally I'd like to get two columns for each line.....but I imagine that should be easy enough if I can figure out how to get the column I want.

I tried " awk -F" " '{print $5 "," $1 }' " - but this gives me the problem...any ideas?