Shell Script - print selected columns

Question

Hi,

I have a txt file with columns separated by tabs and based on that file, I want to create a new file that only contains information from some of the columns.

This is what I have now
awk '{ print $1, $5 }' filename > newfilename

That works except that when column 5 contains spaces e.g 123 Street, only 123 shows up and the street is considered as another column.

How can I achieve what I'm trying to do?

Thanks,
Tee

Answer 1

You can specify the field separator as tab:

awk 'BEGIN { FS = "\t" } ; { print $1, $5 }' filename > newfilename 

Or from the command line like this:

awk -F"\t" '{ print $1, $5 }' filename > newfilename