How to get the first column of every line from a CSV file?

awk, bash, csv, shell, text-parsing

Solution

Try this:

 awk -F"," '{print $1}' data.txt

It will split each input line in the file `data.txt` into different fields based on `,` character (as specified with the `-F`) and print the first field (column) to stdout.

Problem

How do get the first column of every line in an input CSV file and output to a new file? I am thinking using `awk` but not sure how.

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