Sometimes, a structured text file might be malformatted. A simple way to verify it is to count the number of fields in each line.
You can count the number of fields in each line using the following awk command. Unfortunately, awk does not take escaped characters into consideration …
It is suggested that you use Python instead of Shell to manipulate text files!!
Besides passing an unsigned integer as parameter to the option -n,
you can also pass a signed integer to it.
When a signed integer is passed to -n,
it means from/to (inclusive/exclusive similar to …
It is suggested that you use Python instead of Shell to manipulate text files!
Please refer to
Advanced Use of "head" and "tail"
on how to use head and tail for printing rows from a text file.
These 2 commands are convenient when you want to take head/tail rows …
My first choice is pandas in Python. However, below are some tools for quick and dirty solutions.
q -t -H 'select c1, c3 from file.txt'
cut -d\t -f1,3 file.txt
awk -F'\t' '{print $1 "\t" $3}' file.tsv
Note: neither cut …
For small structured text files, it is suggested that you use the q command to manipulate it.
For complicated logic,
it is suggested that you use a scripting language (e.g., Python) instead.
I personally discourage using of awk
unless you have a large file (that q cannot …