That did it RubiC! Such a simple and elegant way to accomplish it! Thanks so much also to Scrutinizer and Don Cragun for your help!

If I may, could I please ask a question about the field separator value? The man AWK page seems to only imply rather than being explicit that the use of the square brackets when setting the field separator from the command line tells AWK to interpret what is between them as a regex rather than simply a fixed string which would otherwise be indicated by "..."? Is this correct? Thanks again!

--- Post updated at 04:30 PM ---

That did it RubiC! Such a simple and elegant way to accomplish it! Thanks so much also to Scrutinizer and Don Cragun for your help!

If I may, could I please ask two questions about how this code is working? The first is about the field separator value. The man AWK page seems to only imply rather than being explicit that the use of the square brackets when setting the field separator from the command line tells AWK to interpret what is between them as a regex rather than simply a fixed string which would otherwise be indicated by "..."? Is this correct?

Secondly, since the value for FS has been set to "][" how come when the print statement calls for {print $1} is does not print from the beginning of the line to the first instance of "][" but rather prints what would be $1 when FS is set to whitespace? In other words, given:

Code:

 PS028,006 [KJ <Cj>] [CM< <Pr>] [QWL TXNWNJ- <Ob>]
 Lexeme     KJ      # CM<      # QWL TXNWN J      #
 PhraseType  6(6) 1(1:2) 2(2.1,2.1,7)
 PhraseLab  509[0]    501[0]     503[0]
 ClauseType xQt0

Why does RudiC's code not give:PS028,006 [KJ <Cj> for {print $1} if FS is set to "]["?

Rather it gives the (desired) first field if FS was at default PS028,006?

Thanks again!