Shell Programming and Scripting

Here I want to use any of the following single characters as field seperators: /, [, ] or space.

This equates to the regular expression [/ \][] (just like [ABC] would allow a single A, B or C character)

Because the \ (backslash) character means something to the shell we need to escape it (using another backslash) to ensure our required regular expression gets passed through to awk intact.

You can see in this demo code how awk gets as it's final FS value:

Code:

$ echo "[10/12/2012 10:51]" | awk -F"[/ \\\][]" '{ print FS ; print $2; print $3; print $5 }'
[/ \][]
10
12
10:51

Thanks, gracias, danke, merci