Re: reading the first colums of text file

[Bob Proulx]

Brian J. Murrell wrote:
> Bob Proulx wrote:
> >   echo one two three four five six seven | awk '{print$2,$NF}'
> >   two seven
> 
> That one always drives me nuts.  Why fork/exec for such a heavy process
> for something bash can do itself:

In the end the real answer is that to me it's simpler, less typing,
solves the problem but mostly because *I like awk*.  :-)

BTW... Awk is used so much on a system that most likely it is already
in ram and is probably not as heavy of a system impact as you imply.

> Probably a dozen other ways to do it too.

Yes.

Bob