Understanding Fields

Assuming a file exists with following contents:

10   Peter     Terence   Roux        45
11   Virginia  Genevive  Roux        45
12   Felix     Devon     Roux         5
13   David     Bruce     Stevenson   48
14   Bob       James     Smith       16
48   Adam      Winter    Ridley      23

Issue the following command:

awk '{print $1,$2,$3,$4,$5}' /sharewiz/awk/test.txt

which will display something like:

10 Peter Terence Roux 45
11 Virginia Genevive Roux 45
12 Felix Devon Roux 5
13 David Bruce Stevenson 48
14 Bob James Smith 16
48 Adam Winter Ridley 23

• AWK has read each field in the file into the variables $1, $2, $3, etc.
• Each field is split by a field separator, which by default is a space or comma.
  • As can be seen, it does not matter how many spaces separate each field in the input file.