UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I have a script which uses awk to read from a file seperated with commas, although saved as a .conf file.

Code:

 awk -F, '{print $3}'

it is meant to pick up "a label here" (for example)

But instead return "a"

Problem is that although the command does recognise the comma seperation it still recognises blank sapces also as deilimiters, which means the next command printing the $4 variable is picking up the blank space " ".

Is there any way to get awk to completely ignore blank spaces and just use the commas as delimiters? The field I am reading must remain as it is and I cannot remove the spaces.

---------- Post updated at 04:02 AM ---------- Previous update was at 03:55 AM ----------

sorry problem solved.

The issue was with the rest of the command, which was:

Code:

KEY_LBL=`printf ${FILE}| awk -F, '{print $3}'`

However I changed it to:

Code:

KEY_LBL=`echo ${FILE}| awk -F, '{print $3}'`

and it now works a treat. Simple echo / printf issue.

Could you please post the content of your file?

Usually awk wont consider the space as default separator when -F is used.

Code:

Code:

vidya> awk -F, '{print $3}' vv
c d e
vidya> cat vv
a,b,c d e,e f,g
vidya>