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The -F option lets you specify the field separator for awk, but using '\n' as the line separator doesn't work, that is, it doesn't make $1 the first line of the input, $2 the second line, and so on.
I suspect that this is because awk looks for the field separator within each line. Is there a way to get around this with awk, or some other Linux command? Basically, I want to separate my input by newline characters and put them into an Excel file.
I'm still warming up to Linux and shell scripts, which is the reason for my lack of creativity with this problem.
Thank you!
931
Just put your desired field separator with the -F option in the AWK command and the column number you want to print segregated as per your mentioned field separator.
Original answer: Append printf "\n" at the end of each awk action {} . printf "\n" will print a newline.
The variable FS is used to set the input field separator. In awk , space and tab act as default field separators. The corresponding field value can be accessed through $1 , $2 , $3 ... and so on. -F - command-line option for setting input field separator.
The default value of the field separator FS is a string containing a single space, " " . If awk interpreted this value in the usual way, each space character would separate fields, so two spaces in a row would make an empty field between them.
You may require to overwrite the input record separator (RS), which default is newline.
See my example below,
$ cat test.txt
a
b
c
d
$ awk 'BEGIN{ RS = "" ; FS = "\n" }{print $1,$2,$3,$4}' test.txt
a b c d
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