Get a specific column number by column name using awk

Question

i have n number of file, in these files a specific column named "thrudate" is given at different column number in every files.

i Just want to extract the value of this column from all files in one go. So i tried with using awk. Here i'm considering only one file, and extracting the values of thrudate

awk -F, -v header=1,head="" '{for(j=1;j<=2;j++){if($header==1){for(i=1;i<=$NF;i++){if($i=="thrudate"){$head=$i;$header=0;break}}} elif($header==0){print $0}}}' file | head -10

How i have approached:

used find command to find all the similar files and then executing the second step for every file
loop all fields in first row, checking the column name with header values as 1 (initialized it to 1 to check first row only), once it matched with 'thrudate', i set header as 0, then break from this loop.
once i get the column number then print it for every row.

hek2mgl · Accepted Answer · 2017-08-10 10:32:48Z

You can use the following awk script:

print_col.awk:

# Find the column number in the first line of a file FNR==1{ for(n=1;n<=NF;n++) { if($n == header) { next } } } # Print that column on all other lines { print $n }

Then use find to execute this script on every file:

find ... -exec awk -v header="foo" -f print_col.awk {} +

In comments you've asked for a version that could print multiple columns based on their header names. You may use the following script for that:

print_cols.awk:

BEGIN { # Parse headers into an assoc array h split(header, a, ",") for(i in a) { h[a[i]]=1 } } # Find the column numbers in the first line of a file FNR==1{ split("", cols) # This will re-init cols for(i=1;i<=NF;i++) { if($i in h) { cols[i]=1 } } next } # Print those columns on all other lines { res = "" for(i=1;i<=NF;i++) { if(i in cols) { s = res ? OFS : "" res = res "" s "" $i } } if (res) { print res } }

Call it like this:

find ... -exec awk -v header="foo,bar,test" -f print_cols.awk {} +

thank you, this is damn correct, just wanted to know if we can do this to fetch 2 columns?

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