awk delimiters
I have been using awk for a while and I had a use case where I wanted to use multiple delimiter, ' ' being one of them. If its just space, we can use : awk -F' ' '{print $2}' If its bunch of characters, we can use : awk -F'[.:]' '{print $2}' But with space, we need to use as follows : awk -F'[[:space:].]+' '{print $2}' I have not been able to figure out to associate '+' only to space. But for now this will server the purpose as long as I can combine multiple '.' Some other classes are: [[:blank:][:cntrl:]] [ \t,:;]