How to get the second column from command output?

Question

Use -F [field separator] to split the lines on "s:

awk -F '"' '{print $2}' your_input_file

or for input from pipe

<some_command> | awk -F '"' '{print $2}'

output:

A B
C
D

If you could use something other than 'awk' , then try this instead

echo '1540 "A B"' | cut -d' ' -f2-

-d is a delimiter, -f is the field to cut and with -f2- we intend to cut the 2nd field until end.

This should work to get a specific column out of the command output "docker images":

REPOSITORY                          TAG                 IMAGE ID            CREATED             SIZE
ubuntu                              16.04               12543ced0f6f        10 months ago       122 MB
ubuntu                              latest              12543ced0f6f        10 months ago       122 MB
selenium/standalone-firefox-debug   2.53.0              9f3bab6e046f        12 months ago       613 MB
selenium/node-firefox-debug         2.53.0              d82f2ab74db7        12 months ago       613 MB


docker images | awk '{print $3}'

IMAGE
12543ced0f6f
12543ced0f6f
9f3bab6e046f
d82f2ab74db7

This is going to print the third column

Or use sed & regex.

<some_command> | sed 's/^.* \(".*"$\)/\1/'

You don't need awk for that. Using read in Bash shell should be enough, e.g.

some_command | while read c1 c2; do echo $c2; done

or:

while read c1 c2; do echo $c2; done < in.txt

If you have GNU awk this is the solution you want:

$ awk '{print $1}' FPAT='"[^"]+"' file
"A B"
"C"
"D"

awk -F"|" '{gsub(/\"/,"|");print "\""$2"\""}' your_file