Get result from awk using two delimiters in a single command

There is another way to do this with awk (similar to comment on one of the answers)

awk -F, '/received/ {print int($2)}' 

function int() will "discard" nonnumber information after the first number

You have already gotten some fine awk answers, so here are a few alternatives.

1. GNU grep

   $ ping -c 4 8.8.8.8 | grep -oP '\d+(?= received,)' 4 

2. Perl

   $ ping -c 4 8.8.8.8 | perl -lne 'print $1 if /(\d+) received,/' 4 

3. sed

   $ ping -c 4 8.8.8.8 | sed -En 's/.*, ([0-9]+) received,.*/\1/p' 4 

The field separator can be a regular expression, so you can set multiple field delimiters in awk using [ ] such as:

awk -F '[, ]' '/received/ {print $5}' 

However in this case I would probably just remove the word received:

 awk -F, '/received/ {sub(/received/, "", $2); print $2}' 

The awk sub() function sub(regexp, replacement [, target]) will find the pattern represented by the regular expression, replace it with replacement, and can optionally be narrowed to a target column.

 ping -c4 <ipadress>|awk '/received/{for(i=1;i<=NF;i++){if($i ~ /received/){print $(i-1)}}}' 

output

4 

All of the answers here are good at addressing OP's specific rqeuirements.

However, none of them address the general question of splitting a field on a delimiter other than the "main" delimiter used by the main AWK loop.

The answer is to use the split() function, available in all AWK versions that I know of, including the One True AWK and the POSIX specification:

/received/ { split($2, recv, " "); print(recv[1]) } 

This emits 4 on stdout:

awk -F ',' ' /received/ { split($2, recv, " "); print(recv[1]) } ' <<\EOD PING 8.8.8.8 (8.8.8.8) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=1 ttl=128 time=8.04 ms 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=2 ttl=128 time=7.47 ms 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=3 ttl=128 time=7.72 ms 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=4 ttl=128 time=7.50 ms --- 8.8.8.8 ping statistics --- 4 packets transmitted, 4 received, 0% packet loss, time 3007ms rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 7.473/7.683/8.037/0.225 ms EOD 

Note split() has the same semantics as top-level record splitting with FS. That is, it should behave exactly like a second delimiter. This is implied by (but not explicitly stated in) the POSIX specification, and is explicitly stated in the GNU AWK manual page. The main effect of this that (like FS) if the separator pattern is " ", leading and trailing whitespace is stripped and consecutive whitespace characters are treated as single spaces.

Bash command line:

recv=( $(ping -c 4 8.8.8.8 | grep received) ); echo ${recv[3]} 

Capture the result of 'ping' piped to 'grep' as the array 'recv'; display the 3rd element of the array.

Output:

4 

Or do it in the most awk fashion without physically counting fields :

mawk NF RS='^.+tted,[ \t]*|[ \t]*recei.+$' testfile4.txt 4 

If you use the quick printout feature from gawk, you can see that RT matches the entire tail of it :

RT: " received, 0% packet loss, time 3007ms\nrtt min/avg/max/mdev = 7.473/7.683/8.037/0.225 ms\n"