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Harsha
Asked: 2019-09-30 22:47:06 +0800 CST

Remove words from a column in a file

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I have file which contains something like below 

5,test,2019-09-27T11:06:23Z,closed,harshavardhanc,2019-09-27T11:09:28Z,2,2
4,test,2019-09-26T16:56:40Z,closed,harshavardhanc,2019-09-26T16:57:02Z,1,1
3,test,2019-09-26T16:54:25Z,closed,harshavardhanc,2019-09-26T16:54:55Z,1,1
2,test,2019-09-26T16:52:59Z,closed,harshavardhanc,2019-09-26T16:55:19Z,1,1
1,test,2019-09-26T16:46:52Z,closed,harshavardhanc,2019-09-26T16:47:25Z,1,1

I want to trim the 3rd column 2019-09-27T11:06:23Z to 2019-09-27 Basically I want to remove time and just keep date here. 

4,test,2019-09-26,closed,harshavardhanc,2019-09-26T16:57:02Z,1,1
3,test,2019-09-26,closed,harshavardhanc,2019-09-26T16:54:55Z,1,1
2,test,2019-09-26,closed,harshavardhanc,2019-09-26T16:55:19Z,1,1
1,test,2019-09-26,closed,harshavardhanc,2019-09-26T16:47:25Z,1,1

I tried using awk with gsub awk '{gsub("T","",$3);print}' test

But no luck, please help how can I achieve this.

scripts command-line bash awk

1 Answers

  1. Try:

    $ awk -F, '{sub(/T.*/,"",$3);print}' OFS=, file
5,test,2019-09-27,closed,harshavardhanc,2019-09-27T11:09:28Z,2,2
4,test,2019-09-26,closed,harshavardhanc,2019-09-26T16:57:02Z,1,1
3,test,2019-09-26,closed,harshavardhanc,2019-09-26T16:54:55Z,1,1
2,test,2019-09-26,closed,harshavardhanc,2019-09-26T16:55:19Z,1,1
1,test,2019-09-26,closed,harshavardhanc,2019-09-26T16:47:25Z,1,1

    Notes:

    1. Your file is comma separated. Thus, you need to specify -F, so that, on input, each line is divided into fields based on commas.

    2. Since you want a comma-separated file on output, we also need to specify OFS=,.

    3. The first argument to sub (or gsub) should be a regular expression not a string. In our case the regular expression should match T and everything after. .* means everything after.

    4. Since awk programmers often pride themselves on conciseness, you might want to remove print (too long-winded) and instead use:

      awk -F, '{sub(/T.*/,"",$3)} 1' OFS=, file
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