I'm working on a long Bash script. I want to read cells from a CSV file into Bash variables. I can parse lines and the first column, but not any other column. Here's my code so far:
cat myfile.csv|while read line
do
read -d, col1 col2 < <(echo $line)
echo "I got:$col1|$col2"
done
It's only printing the first column. As an additional test, I tried the following:
read -d, x y < <(echo a,b,)
And $y is empty. So I tried:
read x y < <(echo a b)
And $y is b. Why?
You need to use IFS instead of -d:
while IFS=, read -r col1 col2
do
echo "I got:$col1|$col2"
done < myfile.csv
To skip a given number of header lines:
skip_headers=3
while IFS=, read -r col1 col2
do
if ((skip_headers))
then
((skip_headers--))
else
echo "I got:$col1|$col2"
fi
done < myfile.csv
Note that for general purpose CSV parsing you should use a specialized tool which can handle quoted fields with internal commas, among other issues that Bash can't handle by itself. Examples of such tools are cvstool and csvkit.
How to parse a CSV file in Bash?
Coming late to this question and as bash do offer new features, because this question stand about bash and because none of already posted answer show this powerful and compliant way of doing precisely this.
Parsing CSV files under bash, using loadable module
Conforming to RFC 4180, a string like this sample CSV row:
12,22.45,"Hello, ""man"".","A, b.",42
should be splitted as
1 12
2 22.45
3 Hello, "man".
4 A, b.
5 42
bash loadable .C compiled modules.
Under bash, you could create, edit, and use loadable c compiled modules. Once loaded, they work like any other builtin!! ( You may find more information at source tree. ;)
Current source tree (Oct 15 2021, bash V5.1-rc3) do contain a bunch of samples:
accept listen for and accept a remote network connection on a given port
asort Sort arrays in-place
basename Return non-directory portion of pathname.
cat cat(1) replacement with no options - the way cat was intended.
csv process one line of csv data and populate an indexed array.
dirname Return directory portion of pathname.
fdflags Change the flag associated with one of bash's open file descriptors.
finfo Print file info.
head Copy first part of files.
hello Obligatory "Hello World" / sample loadable.
...
tee Duplicate standard input.
template Example template for loadable builtin.
truefalse True and false builtins.
tty Return terminal name.
uname Print system information.
unlink Remove a directory entry.
whoami Print out username of current user.
There is an full working cvs parser ready to use in examples/loadables directory: csv.c!!
Under Debian GNU/Linux based system, you may have to install bash-builtins package by
apt install bash-builtins
Using loadable bash-builtins:
Then:
enable -f /usr/lib/bash/csv csv
From there, you could use csv as a bash builtin.
With my sample: 12,22.45,"Hello, ""man"".","A, b.",42
csv -a myArray '12,22.45,"Hello, ""man"".","A, b.",42'
printf "%s\n" "${myArray[#]}" | cat -n
1 12
2 22.45
3 Hello, "man".
4 A, b.
5 42
Then in a loop, processing a file.
while IFS= read -r line;do
csv -a aVar "$line"
printf "First two columns are: [ '%s' - '%s' ]\n" "${aVar[0]}" "${aVar[1]}"
done <myfile.csv
This way is clearly the quickest and strongest than using any other combination of bash builtins or fork to any binary.
Unfortunely, depending on your system implementation, if your version of bash was compiled without loadable, this may not work...
Complete sample with multiline CSV fields.
Conforming to RFC 4180, a string like this single CSV row:
12,22.45,"Hello ""man"",
This is a good day, today!","A, b.",42
should be splitted as
1 12
2 22.45
3 Hello "man",
This is a good day, today!
4 A, b.
5 42
Full sample script for parsing CSV containing multilines fields
Here is a small sample file with 1 headline, 4 columns and 3 rows. Because two fields do contain newline, the file are 6 lines length.
Id,Name,Desc,Value
1234,Cpt1023,"Energy counter",34213
2343,Sns2123,"Temperatur sensor
to trigg for alarm",48.4
42,Eye1412,"Solar sensor ""Day /
Night""",12199.21
And a small script able to parse this file correctly:
#!/bin/bash
enable -f /usr/lib/bash/csv csv
file="sample.csv"
exec {FD}<"$file"
read -ru $FD line
csv -a headline "$line"
printf -v fieldfmt '%-8s: "%%q"\\n' "${headline[#]}"
numcols=${#headline[#]}
while read -ru $FD line;do
while csv -a row "$line" ; (( ${#row[#]} < numcols )) ;do
read -ru $FD sline || break
line+=$'\n'"$sline"
done
printf "$fieldfmt\\n" "${row[#]}"
done
This may render: (I've used printf "%q" to represent non-printables characters like newlines as $'\n')
Id : "1234"
Name : "Cpt1023"
Desc : "Energy\ counter"
Value : "34213"
Id : "2343"
Name : "Sns2123"
Desc : "$'Temperatur sensor\nto trigg for alarm'"
Value : "48.4"
Id : "42"
Name : "Eye1412"
Desc : "$'Solar sensor "Day /\nNight"'"
Value : "12199.21"
You could find a full working sample there: csvsample.sh.txt or
csvsample.sh.
Note:
In this sample, I use head line to determine row width (number of columns). If you're head line could hold newlines, (or if your CSV use more than 1 head line). You will have to pass number or columns as argument to your script (and the number of head lines).
Warning:
Of course, parsing CSV using this is not perfect! This work for many simple CSV files, but care about encoding and security!! For sample, this module won't be able to handle binary fields!
Read carefully csv.c source code comments and RFC 4180!
From the man page:
-d delim
The first character of delim is used to terminate the input line,
rather than newline.
You are using -d, which will terminate the input line on the comma. It will not read the rest of the line. That's why $y is empty.
We can parse csv files with quoted strings and delimited by say | with following code
while read -r line
do
field1=$(echo "$line" | awk -F'|' '{printf "%s", $1}' | tr -d '"')
field2=$(echo "$line" | awk -F'|' '{printf "%s", $2}' | tr -d '"')
echo "$field1 $field2"
done < "$csvFile"
awk parses the string fields to variables and tr removes the quote.
Slightly slower as awk is executed for each field.
In addition to the answer from #Dennis Williamson, it may be helpful to skip the first line when it contains the header of the CSV:
{
read
while IFS=, read -r col1 col2
do
echo "I got:$col1|$col2"
done
} < myfile.csv
If you want to read CSV file with some lines, so this the solution.
while IFS=, read -ra line
do
test $i -eq 1 && ((i=i+1)) && continue
for col_val in ${line[#]}
do
echo -n "$col_val|"
done
echo
done < "$csvFile"
I have a coma delimited csv file named 'itrs.csv' which I want to parse into a matrix or 2d array using a script bash or shell
Loads\PostDate,schedule,seta,eeta,2019-11-05,2019-11-06,2019-11-07,2019-11-08
BANAMEX,7,1:18:10,1:23:45,G,G,C,C
EMEA,5,0:21:00,1:01:00,G,G,G,C
I have tried the following:
declare -A matrix
eval matrix=($(awk -f, itrs.csv))
for ((i=0;i<=2;i++))
do
for ((j=0;j<=$6;j++))
do
echo ${matrix[$i,$j]}" "
done
echo
done
but above code is throwing errors. I also would like to know how to check the number of columns and rows while parsing data because csv file size may change.
Well, you can do this: Create an associative array, iterate over lines and keep the count of the current line, then iterate over the fields and create an associative array with indexes as requested.
i=0
declare -A matrix
while IFS=, read -r -a line; do
for ((j = 0; j < ${#line[#]}; ++j)); do
matrix[$i,$j]=${line[$j]}
done
((i++))
done < itrs.csv
After it declare -p matrix would output:
declare -A matrix=([1,5]="G" [1,4]="G" [1,7]="C" [1,6]="C" [1,1]="7" [1,0]="BANAMEX" [1,3]="1:23:45" [1,2]="1:18:10" [0,4]="2019-11-05" [0,5]="2019-11-06" [0,6]="2019-11-07"[0,7]="2019-11-08" [0,0]="Loads\\PostDate" [0,1]="schedule" [0,2]="seta" [0,3]="eeta" [2,6]="G" [2,7]="C" [2,4]="G"[2,5]="G" [2,2]="0:21:00" [2,3]="1:01:00" [2,0]="EMEA" [2,1]="5" )
See bashfaq How can I read a file (data stream, variable) line-by-line (and/or field-by-field)?
Don't use eval. eval is evil. Don't eval arr=($(..)) unless you know what you are doing. In your case, using eval looks like it has little to zero sense.
The error comes from awk. awk works like awk [options] script [file], you could awk -F, '{print $0}' itrs.csv, but it would make no sense. The itrs.csv is parsed by awk as being the script - as it makes no sense as a awk script, the tool throws an error.
To read for example the first line only separated by comma into an array in bash you can IFS=, line=($(head -n1 itrs.csv)). The -F, affects how awk parses the file, not how bash creates array - for that use IFS.
I have the following script where I'm parsing 2 csv files to find a MATCH the files have 10000 lines each one. But the processing is taking a long time!!! Is this normal?
My script:
#!/bin/bash
IFS=$'\n'
CSV_FILE1=$1;
CSV_FILE2=$2;
sort -t';' $CSV_FILE1 >> Sorted_CSV1
sort -t';' $CSV_FILE2 >> Sorted_CSV2
echo "PATH1 ; NAME1 ; SIZE1 ; CKSUM1 ; PATH2 ; NAME2 ; SIZE2 ; CKSUM2" >> 'mapping.csv'
while read lineCSV1 #Parse 1st CSV file
do
PATH1=`echo $lineCSV1 | awk '{print $1}'`
NAME1=`echo $lineCSV1 | awk '{print $3}'`
SIZE1=`echo $lineCSV1 | awk '{print $7}'`
CKSUM1=`echo $lineCSV1 | awk '{print $9}'`
while read lineCSV2 #Parse 2nd CSV file
do
PATH2=`echo $lineCSV2 | awk '{print $1}'`
NAME2=`echo $lineCSV2 | awk '{print $3}'`
SIZE2=`echo $lineCSV2 | awk '{print $7}'`
CKSUM2=`echo $lineCSV2 | awk '{print $9}'`
# Test if NAM1 MATCHS NAME2
if [[ $NAME1 == $NAME2 ]]; then
#Test checksum OF THE MATCHING NAME
if [[ $CKSUM1 != $CKSUM2 ]]; then
#MAPPING OF THE MATCHING LINES
echo $PATH1 ';' $NAME1 ';' $SIZE1 ';' $CKSUM1 ';' $PATH2 ';' $NAME2 ';' $SIZE2 ';' $CKSUM2 >> 'mapping.csv'
fi
break #When its a match break the while loop and go the the next Row of the 1st CSV File
fi
done < Sorted_CSV2 #Done CSV2
done < Sorted_CSV1 #Done CSV1
This is a quadratic order. Also, see Tom Fenech comment: You are calling awk several times inside a loop inside another loop. Instead of using awk for the fields in every line try setting the IFS shell variable to ";" and read the fields directly in read commands:
IFS=";"
while read FIELD11 FIELD12 FIELD13; do
while read FIELD21 FIELD22 FIELD23; do
...
done <Sorted_CSV2
done <Sorted_CSV1
Though, this would be still O(N^2) and very inefficient. It seems you are matching 2 fields by a coincident field. This task is easier and faster to accomplish by using join command line utility, and would reduce order from O(N^2) to O(N).
Whenever you say "Does this file/data list/table have something that matches this file/data list/table?", you should think of associative arrays (sometimes called hashes).
An associative array is keyed by a particular value and each key is associated with a value. The nice thing is that finding a key is extremely fast.
In your loop of a loop, you have 10,000 lines in each file. You're outer loop executed 10,000 times. Your inner loop may execute 10,000 times for each and every line in your first file. That's 10,000 x 10,000 times you go through that inner loop. That's potentially looping 100 million times through that inner loop. Think you can see why your program might be a little slow?
In this day and age, having a 10,000 member associative array isn't that bad. (Imagine doing this back in 1980 on a MS-DOS system with 256K. It just wouldn't work). So, let's go through the first file, create a 10,000 member associative array, and then go through the second file looking for matching lines.
Bash 4.x has associative arrays, but I only have Bash 3.2 on my system, so I can't really give you an answer in Bash.
Besides, sometimes Bash isn't the answer to a particular issue. Bash can be a bit slow and the syntax can be error prone. Awk might be faster, but many versions don't have associative arrays. This is really a job for a higher level scripting language like Python or Perl.
Since I can't do a Bash answer, here's a Perl answer. Maybe this will help. Or, maybe this will inspire someone who has Bash 4.x can give an answer in Bash.
I Basically open the first file and create an associative array keyed by the checksum. If this is a sha1 checksum, it should be unique for all files (unless they're an exact match). If you don't have a sha1 checksum, you'll need to massage the structure a wee bit, but it's pretty much the same idea.
Once I have the associative array figured out, I then open file #2 and simply see if the checksum already exists in the file. If it does, I know I have a matching line, and print out the two matches.
I have to loop 10,000 times in the first file, and 10,000 times in the second. That's only 20,000 loops instead of 10 million that's 20,000 times less looping which means the program will run 20,000 times faster. So, if it takes 2 full days for your program to run with a double loop, an associative array solution will work in less than one second.
#! /usr/bin/env perl
#
use strict;
use warnings;
use autodie;
use feature qw(say);
use constant {
FILE1 => "file1.txt",
FILE2 => "file2.txt",
MATCHING => "csv_matches.txt",
};
#
# Open the first file and create the associative array
#
my %file_data;
open my $fh1, "<", FILE1;
while ( my $line = <$fh1> ) {
chomp $line;
my ( $path, $blah, $name, $bather, $yadda, $tl_dr, $size, $etc, $check_sum ) = split /\s+/, $line;
#
# The main key is "check_sum" which **should** be unique, especially if it's a sha1
#
$file_data{$check_sum}->{PATH} = $path;
$file_data{$check_sum}->{NAME} = $name;
$file_data{$check_sum}->{SIZE} = $size;
}
close $fh1;
#
# Now, we have the associative array keyed by the data we want to match, read file 2
#
open my $fh2, "<", FILE2;
open my $csv_fh, ">", MATCHING;
while ( my $line = <$fh2> ) {
chomp $line;
my ( $path, $blah, $name, $bather, $yadda, $tl_dr, $size, $etc, $check_sum ) = split /\s+/, $line;
#
# If there is a matching checksum in file1, we know we have a matching entry
#
if ( exists $file_data{$check_sum} ) {
printf {$csv_fh} "%s;%s:%s:%s:%s:%s\n",
$file_data{$check_sum}->{PATH}, $file_data{$check_sum}->{NAME}, $file_data{$check_sum}->{SIZE},
$path, $name, $size;
}
}
close $fh2;
close $csv_fh;
BUGS
(A good manpage always list issues!)
This assumes one match per file. If you have multiple duplicates in file1 or file2, you will only pick up the last one.
This assumes a sha256 or equivalent checksum. In such a checksum, it is extremely unlikely that two files will have the same checksum unless they match. A 16bit checksum from the historic sum command may have collisions.
Although a proper database engine would make a much better tool for this, it is still very well possible to do it with awk.
The trick is to sort your data, so that records with the same name are grouped together. Then a single pass from top to bottom is enough to find the matches. This can be done in linear time.
In detail:
Insert two columns in both CSV files
Make sure every line starts with the name. Also add a number (either 1 or 2) which denotes from which file the line originates. We will need this when we merge the two files together.
awk -F';' '{ print $2 ";1;" $0 }' csvfile1 > tmpfile1
awk -F';' '{ print $2 ";2;" $0 }' csvfile2 > tmpfile2
Concatenate the files, then sort the lines
sort tmpfile1 tmpfile2 > tmpfile3
Scan the result, report the mismatches
awk -F';' -f scan.awk tmpfile3
Where scan.awk contains:
BEGIN {
origin = 3;
}
$1 == name && $2 > origin && $6 != checksum {
print record;
}
{
name = $1;
origin = $2;
checksum = $6;
sub(/^[^;]*;.;/, "");
record = $0;
}
Putting it all together
Crammed together into a Bash oneliner, without explicit temporary files:
(awk -F';' '{print $2";1;"$0}' csvfile1 ; awk -F';' '{print $2";2;"$0}' csvfile2) | sort | awk -F';' 'BEGIN{origin=3}$1==name&&$2>origin&&$6!=checksum{print record}{name=$1;origin=$2;checksum=$6;sub(/^[^;]*;.;/,"");record=$0;}'
Notes:
If the same name appears more than once in csvfile1, then all but the last one are ignored.
If the same name appears more than once in csvfile2, then all but the first one are ignored.
If I have a csv file, is there a quick bash way to print out the contents of only any single column? It is safe to assume that each row has the same number of columns, but each column's content would have different length.
You could use awk for this. Change '$2' to the nth column you want.
awk -F "\"*,\"*" '{print $2}' textfile.csv
yes. cat mycsv.csv | cut -d ',' -f3 will print 3rd column.
The simplest way I was able to get this done was to just use csvtool. I had other use cases as well to use csvtool and it can handle the quotes or delimiters appropriately if they appear within the column data itself.
csvtool format '%(2)\n' input.csv
Replacing 2 with the column number will effectively extract the column data you are looking for.
Landed here looking to extract from a tab separated file. Thought I would add.
cat textfile.tsv | cut -f2 -s
Where -f2 extracts the 2, non-zero indexed column, or the second column.
Here is a csv file example with 2 columns
myTooth.csv
Date,Tooth
2017-01-25,wisdom
2017-02-19,canine
2017-02-24,canine
2017-02-28,wisdom
To get the first column, use:
cut -d, -f1 myTooth.csv
f stands for Field and d stands for delimiter
Running the above command will produce the following output.
Output
Date
2017-01-25
2017-02-19
2017-02-24
2017-02-28
To get the 2nd column only:
cut -d, -f2 myTooth.csv
And here is the output
Output
Tooth
wisdom
canine
canine
wisdom
incisor
Another use case:
Your csv input file contains 10 columns and you want columns 2 through 5 and columns 8, using comma as the separator".
cut uses -f (meaning "fields") to specify columns and -d (meaning "delimiter") to specify the separator. You need to specify the latter because some files may use spaces, tabs, or colons to separate columns.
cut -f 2-5,8 -d , myvalues.csv
cut is a command utility and here is some more examples:
SYNOPSIS
cut -b list [-n] [file ...]
cut -c list [file ...]
cut -f list [-d delim] [-s] [file ...]
I think the easiest is using csvkit:
Gets the 2nd column:
csvcut -c 2 file.csv
However, there's also csvtool, and probably a number of other csv bash tools out there:
sudo apt-get install csvtool (for Debian-based systems)
This would return a column with the first row having 'ID' in it.
csvtool namedcol ID csv_file.csv
This would return the fourth row:
csvtool col 4 csv_file.csv
If you want to drop the header row:
csvtool col 4 csv_file.csv | sed '1d'
First we'll create a basic CSV
[dumb#one pts]$ cat > file
a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,k
1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10
a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,k
1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10
Then we get the 1st column
[dumb#one pts]$ awk -F , '{print $1}' file
a
1
a
1
Many answers for this questions are great and some have even looked into the corner cases.
I would like to add a simple answer that can be of daily use... where you mostly get into those corner cases (like having escaped commas or commas in quotes etc.,).
FS (Field Separator) is the variable whose value is dafaulted to
space. So awk by default splits at space for any line.
So using BEGIN (Execute before taking input) we can set this field to anything we want...
awk 'BEGIN {FS = ","}; {print $3}'
The above code will print the 3rd column in a csv file.
The other answers work well, but since you asked for a solution using just the bash shell, you can do this:
AirBoxOmega:~ d$ cat > file #First we'll create a basic CSV
a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,k
1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10
a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,k
1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10
a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,k
1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10
a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,k
1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10
a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,k
1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10
a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,k
1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10
And then you can pull out columns (the first in this example) like so:
AirBoxOmega:~ d$ while IFS=, read -a csv_line;do echo "${csv_line[0]}";done < file
a
1
a
1
a
1
a
1
a
1
a
1
So there's a couple of things going on here:
while IFS=, - this is saying to use a comma as the IFS (Internal Field Separator), which is what the shell uses to know what separates fields (blocks of text). So saying IFS=, is like saying "a,b" is the same as "a b" would be if the IFS=" " (which is what it is by default.)
read -a csv_line; - this is saying read in each line, one at a time and create an array where each element is called "csv_line" and send that to the "do" section of our while loop
do echo "${csv_line[0]}";done < file - now we're in the "do" phase, and we're saying echo the 0th element of the array "csv_line". This action is repeated on every line of the file. The < file part is just telling the while loop where to read from. NOTE: remember, in bash, arrays are 0 indexed, so the first column is the 0th element.
So there you have it, pulling out a column from a CSV in the shell. The other solutions are probably more practical, but this one is pure bash.
You could use GNU Awk, see this article of the user guide.
As an improvement to the solution presented in the article (in June 2015), the following gawk command allows double quotes inside double quoted fields; a double quote is marked by two consecutive double quotes ("") there. Furthermore, this allows empty fields, but even this can not handle multiline fields. The following example prints the 3rd column (via c=3) of textfile.csv:
#!/bin/bash
gawk -- '
BEGIN{
FPAT="([^,\"]*)|(\"((\"\")*[^\"]*)*\")"
}
{
if (substr($c, 1, 1) == "\"") {
$c = substr($c, 2, length($c) - 2) # Get the text within the two quotes
gsub("\"\"", "\"", $c) # Normalize double quotes
}
print $c
}
' c=3 < <(dos2unix <textfile.csv)
Note the use of dos2unix to convert possible DOS style line breaks (CRLF i.e. "\r\n") and UTF-16 encoding (with byte order mark) to "\n" and UTF-8 (without byte order mark), respectively. Standard CSV files use CRLF as line break, see Wikipedia.
If the input may contain multiline fields, you can use the following script. Note the use of special string for separating records in output (since the default separator newline could occur within a record). Again, the following example prints the 3rd column (via c=3) of textfile.csv:
#!/bin/bash
gawk -- '
BEGIN{
RS="\0" # Read the whole input file as one record;
# assume there is no null character in input.
FS="" # Suppose this setting eases internal splitting work.
ORS="\n####\n" # Use a special output separator to show borders of a record.
}
{
nof=patsplit($0, a, /([^,"\n]*)|("(("")*[^"]*)*")/, seps)
field=0;
for (i=1; i<=nof; i++){
field++
if (field==c) {
if (substr(a[i], 1, 1) == "\"") {
a[i] = substr(a[i], 2, length(a[i]) - 2) # Get the text within
# the two quotes.
gsub(/""/, "\"", a[i]) # Normalize double quotes.
}
print a[i]
}
if (seps[i]!=",") field=0
}
}
' c=3 < <(dos2unix <textfile.csv)
There is another approach to the problem. csvquote can output contents of a CSV file modified so that special characters within field are transformed so that usual Unix text processing tools can be used to select certain column. For example the following code outputs the third column:
csvquote textfile.csv | cut -d ',' -f 3 | csvquote -u
csvquote can be used to process arbitrary large files.
I needed proper CSV parsing, not cut / awk and prayer. I'm trying this on a mac without csvtool, but macs do come with ruby, so you can do:
echo "require 'csv'; CSV.read('new.csv').each {|data| puts data[34]}" | ruby
I wonder why none of the answers so far have mentioned csvkit.
csvkit is a suite of command-line tools for converting to and working
with CSV
csvkit documentation
I use it exclusively for csv data management and so far I have not found a problem that I could not solve using cvskit.
To extract one or more columns from a cvs file you can use the csvcut utility that is part of the toolbox. To extract the second column use this command:
csvcut -c 2 filename_in.csv > filename_out.csv
csvcut reference page
If the strings in the csv are quoted, add the quote character with the q option:
csvcut -q '"' -c 2 filename_in.csv > filename_out.csv
Install with pip install csvkit or sudo apt install csvkit.
Simple solution using awk. Instead of "colNum" put the number of column you need to print.
cat fileName.csv | awk -F ";" '{ print $colNum }'
csvtool col 2 file.csv
where 2 is the column you are interested in
you can also do
csvtool col 1,2 file.csv
to do multiple columns
You can't do it without a full CSV parser.
If you know your data will not be quoted, then any solution that splits on , will work well (I tend to reach for cut -d, -f1 | sed 1d), as will any of the CSV manipulation tools.
If you want to produce another CSV file, then xsv, csvkit, csvtool, or other CSV manipulation tools are appropriate.
If you want to extract the contents of one single column of a CSV file, unquoting them so that they can be processed by subsequent commands, this Python 1-liner does the trick for CSV files with headers:
python -c 'import csv,sys'$'\n''for row in csv.DictReader(sys.stdin): print(row["message"])'
The "message" inside of the print function selects the column.
If the CSV file doesn't have headers:
python -c 'import csv,sys'$'\n''for row in csv.reader(sys.stdin): print(row[1])'
Python's CSV library supports all kinds of CSV dialects, so if your CSV file uses different conventions, it's possible to support them with relatively little change to the code.
Been using this code for a while, it is not "quick" unless you count "cutting and pasting from stackoverflow".
It uses ${##} and ${%%} operators in a loop instead of IFS. It calls 'err' and 'die', and supports only comma, dash, and pipe as SEP chars (that's all I needed).
err() { echo "${0##*/}: Error:" "$#" >&2; }
die() { err "$#"; exit 1; }
# Return Nth field in a csv string, fields numbered starting with 1
csv_fldN() { fldN , "$1" "$2"; }
# Return Nth field in string of fields separated
# by SEP, fields numbered starting with 1
fldN() {
local me="fldN: "
local sep="$1"
local fldnum="$2"
local vals="$3"
case "$sep" in
-|,|\|) ;;
*) die "$me: arg1 sep: unsupported separator '$sep'" ;;
esac
case "$fldnum" in
[0-9]*) [ "$fldnum" -gt 0 ] || { err "$me: arg2 fldnum=$fldnum must be number greater or equal to 0."; return 1; } ;;
*) { err "$me: arg2 fldnum=$fldnum must be number"; return 1;} ;;
esac
[ -z "$vals" ] && err "$me: missing arg2 vals: list of '$sep' separated values" && return 1
fldnum=$(($fldnum - 1))
while [ $fldnum -gt 0 ] ; do
vals="${vals#*$sep}"
fldnum=$(($fldnum - 1))
done
echo ${vals%%$sep*}
}
Example:
$ CSVLINE="example,fields with whitespace,field3"
$ $ for fno in $(seq 3); do echo field$fno: $(csv_fldN $fno "$CSVLINE"); done
field1: example
field2: fields with whitespace
field3: field3
You can also use while loop
IFS=,
while read name val; do
echo "............................"
echo Name: "$name"
done<itemlst.csv