CODEWITHSUNDEEP
bashawk
user53029
user53029

Reputation: 695

Awk: count all space up to second column as a single variable?

I have a text file that looks like this:

This is the first line    80 55 75%
Second line               25 95 74%  
The next line             50 50 50%

As you can see, on the left side the number of words will vary. Currently, if I use a command like this:

awk 'NR == 1 {print $1,$2,$3,$4}' file

This works out great for the first line and will return:

This is the first line

But if I do this on the second line:

awk 'NR == 2 {print $1,$2,$3,$4}' file

I get this, as expected:

Second line 25 95

But this is not what I need. For scripting purposes, I need awk, or perhaps another tool to "see" anything up to the second column of numbers as a single variable. So regardless of the number of words on the left side, they will always be seen as a single variable. How can I achieve this?

NOTE: I may have lines like this:

This is a testmarket001    65 45 25%

So I don't think you can just tell awk to print all words up to the first number, as it would cut off part of the line.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 272

Answers (2)

karakfa
karakfa

Reputation: 67557

If your fields are tab delimited, just set the delimiter for awk

$ paste file1 file2 file3 | awk -F'\t' '{print $1}'

should work.

Note that column command modifies the tabs. If your file is saved after column formatting, you can try this

$ awk '{for(i=1;i<NF-2;i++) printf "%s ",$i; print ""}' file

This is the first line
Second line
The next line

Upvotes: 1

anubhava
anubhava

Reputation: 786031

If there are always 3 whitespace separates words at the end of each line you can use this awk to get your output:

awk '{gsub(/(\s+\S+){3}\s*$/, "")} 1' file

This is the first line
Second line
The next line

You may also use sed:

sed -E 's/(\s+\S+){3}\s*$//' file

Upvotes: 1

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