<div>
Brilliant! That worked. <br />
Incorporating that format into my solution, I tried the following, where I wanted to specify a pipe char '|' as the delimiter and print out specific columns of a | delimitered .csv file. <br />
<br />
root&gt; awk -F'|' -f file.090101.csv '{ print $2 $11 $18 }'<br />
&nbsp;syntax error The source line is 1.<br />
&nbsp;The error context is<br />
&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&gt;&gt;&gt; Entered|PagerId &lt;&lt;&lt;&nbsp;|Centre|Tran|Operator|Mach<wbr />ine|Port|C<wbr />apcode|FDi<wbr />git|SendPa<wbr />gerId|Prio<wbr />rity|Email<wbr />|Signallin<wbr />g|Message|<wbr />Dest|Sent|<wbr />Confirmed|<wbr />Elapsed|Ch<wbr />ained|<br />
&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; awk: There are 3 extra ) characters.<br />
&nbsp;awk: Quitting<br />
&nbsp;The source line is 1.<br />
<br />
Can you see something that stands out as being wrong? <br />

</div>


<div>
Hmm,<br />
<br />
I found that the following worked!<br />
<br />
cat file.090101 | awk -F'|' '{ print $2 $11 $18 }'<br />
<br />
Can you not have a -f &lt;filename&gt; mixed with a -F&lt;FS&gt;?<br />
<br />
<br />

</div>


<div>
the -f with awk is to instruct awk to take script (awk script) from the file and not command line.
</div>


<div>
Oh, how embarrassing! <br />
<br />
I thought it was specifying the data input file. <br />
<br />
Thank you for your patience.<br />
<br />

</div>


<div>
No need for sed<br />
<br />
awk -F: 'NR==1 {print $1}' /etc/passwd<br />

</div>


<div>
<div class="content wysiwyg-content">
I'm trying to get an awk to work that will look at a file that is | delimitered and print out a field value. <br />
For some reason I can't get it to work and it keeps complaining about a missing } character. <br />
As a test I tried some basic web samples, and they fail in a similar way. <br />
eg. <br />
root&gt; sed 1q /etc/passwd | awk '{ FS = &quot;:&quot; ; print $1 }'<br />
&nbsp;syntax error The source line is 1.<br />
&nbsp;The error context is<br />
&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; { FS = &quot;:&quot; &gt;&gt;&gt;&nbsp; &nbsp;&lt;&lt;&lt;<br />
&nbsp;awk: The statement cannot be correctly parsed.<br />
&nbsp;The source line is 1.<br />
&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; awk: There is a missing } character.<br />
<br />
I'm running this on HP-UX B.11.31 U ia64, but I got the same error on a old SCO server too. <br />
<br />
Can someone please put me out of my misery. I must be missing something very simple.<br />
<br />
Thanks<br />
<br />

</div>
</div>


I'm trying to get an awk to work that will look at a file that is | delimitered and print out a field value. 
For some reason I can't get it to work and it keeps complaining about a missing } character. 
As a test I tried some basic web samples, and they fail in a similar way. 
eg. 
root> sed 1q /etc/passwd | awk '{ FS = ":" ; print $1 }'
 syntax error The source line is 1.
 The error context is
                { FS = ":" >>>   <<<
 awk: The statement cannot be correctly parsed.
 The source line is 1.
        awk: There is a missing } character.

I'm running this on HP-UX B.11.31 U ia64, but I got the same error on a old SCO server too. 

Can someone please put me out of my misery. I must be missing something very simple.

Thanks



Simple awk just not working - please help

Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 at Bell Labs. Today, it is a modern OS with many commercial flavors and licensees, including FreeBSD, Hewlett-Packard’s UX, IBM AIX and Apple Mac OS-X. Apart from its command-line interface, most UNIX variations support the standardized X Window System for GUIs, with the exception of the Mac OS, which uses a proprietary system.