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Comment by johnrob | Hacker News Reader

I really wish awk were less awkward to type (no pun intended). The single quotes plus the brackets is a brutal combo.

Does anyone know how to achieve the following command in a more type friendly way?:

awk '{print $1}'

Actually the single quotes are not part of the Awk language. They are used by the posix shell to preservers the literal meaning of the characters, in this case { } and $. they are not needed in self contained Awk scripts.

I see there's a bunch of replies, some with more and more commands through a pipe.

Seriously, if you are going to be using a shell, you will be typing a ' char all the time, so probably better to just get used to it rather than go through all those convolutions with tr and cut.

cut -f1

Not working for me...

> echo '1 2 3 4' | awk '{print $1}'

> echo '1 2 3 4' | cut -f1

1 2 3 4

   echo '1 2 3 4' | cut -d' ' -f1

By default cut uses TAB as delimiter

Not to be picky, but still not good enough:

   echo '1    2     3 4' | cut -d' ' -f2

'cut' fails when fields are separated by multiple spaces.

Ok.

   > echo '1    2         3 4' | sed 's/  */\t/g' | cut -f2
    2

I usually pipe through a whitespace-to-single-tab command. So

  echo '1   2  3 4' | sp2tab | cut -f2

would be equivalent to

  echo '1   2  3 4' | awk '{print $2}'

but quicker to write.

echo "1 2 3 4" | tr -s " " | cut -f1 -d " "

tr is nice!

Doesn't work, gets caught on leading spaces:

    echo ' 1 2 3 4' | tr -s " " | cut -f1 -d " "
    >
    echo ' 1 2 3 4' | awk '{print $1}'
    >1

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