UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

my data looks like this:

Code:

"Jean Marie","Carroll",carrollj@yahoo.com

all said and done, i'd like to see like this:

Code:

"Jean Marie"
"Caroll"
carroll@yahoo.com

Moderator's Comments:

This user will be unable to respond to requests for more information for a couple of weeks due to continually refusing to use appropriate CODE tags.

What have you tried so far?

Tip: There is a unix command called "tr" - this would be ideal for your request.

Code:

cat filename | awk '{print $1}' > firstname.txt

but it got Jean, not Jean Marie

Please use the code tags when posting code as per forums rules.

The cat command is redundant when using awk as the file name can be passed directly to awk, so the above command you mentioned can be re-written as:

Code:

awk '{print $1}' filename > filename.txt

Like you mentioned though, all this command is doing is printing the first field in the file (separated by default delimiter FS which is a space).

If you see my previous post, I suggested one command which should help you achieve what you are trying to do.

awk '{print $1}' only gets Jean, but not Jean Marie.

lawsongeek:
If you read the posts in this thread carefully, you will see that we all know that awk '{print $1}' will not give you the output that you want. It has been pointed out that tr is better suited to this task than either sed or awk (although either of those could also be easily used to perform this task). I say tr is better suited because it is smaller, faster, and simpler than awk and sed.

It was also pointed out that you were wasting system resources by using a pipeline with cat when awk is perfectly capable of reading a file on its own (and even if it wasn't; shell redirection could be used without starting another process).

While tr is perfect for this simple task,
it is doable in awk if you change the FS delimiter

Code:

awk -F, '{print $1}'