awk命令：如何告诉它区分空格和制表符分隔符

Question

I used this command, awk '{print $1}' "$line" , to get a column of data from a file that looks like this:(underscores represent tab as a delimiter, example is a three-column data)

Joe Jonas_____8_____45  
Cersei Lann_____4_____23  
Bo Tox_____6_____28  
Mis Ter Yo_____7_____89  

When I run the command, say to get the first column, the output, however, showed it like this:

Joe  
Cersei  
Bo  
Mis  

How can I make the command to ignore the spaces within the data of the first column?

Answer 1

Change the field separator (-F) to tab(s):

$ awk -F$'\t*' '{gsub(/ /,"_",$1); print $1,$2}' test2.in
Joe_Jonas 8
Cersei_Lann 4
Bo_Tox 6
Mis_Ter_Yo 7

EDIT: Use gsub on first column to replace space with underscore.