Sometimes, a structured text file might be malformatted. A simple way to verify it is to count the number of fields in each line.

Using awk

You can count the number of fields in each line using the following awk command. Unfortunately, awk does not take escaped characters into consideration …

Python pandas

My first choice is pandas in Python. However, below are some tools for quick and dirty solutions.

q

q -t -H 'select c1, c3 from file.txt'

cut

cut -d\t -f1,3 file.txt

awk

awk -F'\t' '{print $1 "\t" $3}' file.tsv 

Note: neither cut …