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I am learning awk to advance my skills and tried

$ atq | awk "{print $1}" 28 Wed Oct 31 10:23:00 2018 27 Tue Oct 30 21:20:00 2018 25 Tue Oct 30 21:19:00 2018 29 Wed Oct 31 10:42:00 2018 26 Tue Oct 30 21:20:00 2018 20 Tue Oct 30 18:25:00 2018 30 Wed Oct 31 10:59:00 2018 32 Wed Oct 31 21:03:00 2018 23 Tue Oct 30 18:28:00 2018 31 Wed Oct 31 13:58:00 2018 19 Tue Oct 30 15:43:00 2018 21 Tue Oct 30 18:27:00 2018

It did not work as I expected, but it's relatively easy to work small programs together

$ atq | cut -f 1 28 27 25 29 26 20 30 32 23 31 19 21

How could I retrieve the first field using awk?

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    You need single quotes around the awk commands. Commented Oct 31, 2018 at 13:25

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Try the below,

atq | awk '{print $1}'

The single quotes stops the shell from expanding $1 to the shell's first positional parameter.

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  • great, could you please elaborate the reasons. Commented Oct 31, 2018 at 13:24
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    An alternative would be atq | awk "{print \$1}" - sometimes there are reasons you want the double quote, and in that case, escaping the $ is necessary. Contrived example: prefix="foo: "; atq | awk "{print $prefix, \$1}". Granted, that would normally be better accomplished using awks -v variable=... syntax, but it can still be useful sometimes... Commented Oct 31, 2018 at 14:09
  • @twalberg No, you don't generally want the shell to interpolate the awk code. To use a shell variable in an awk program, import it using -v var="$var" or export it and access it through ENVIRON["var"]. Using single quotes around awk code is always possible and always what you'd want to do. Commented Nov 6, 2018 at 10:46

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