Extract certain column from CSV files

Question

I have a directory with a group of CSV files. All files have the same column headers. I need to extract values in a certain column from all files.

The common part in files names is OCS_mobfwref-oam_d01_2014080*

Solution 1

To extract from the 3rd column for example, you can do:

cut -d',' -f3 OCS_mobfwref-oam_d01_2014080* 

This only works if there are no un-escaped comma's!

If you want to remove the headers, do:

sed 1d OCS_mobfwref-oam_d01_2014080* | OCS_mobfwref-oam_d01_2014080* 

Solution 2

the same in awk, with a head in first 2 lines, extracting the third field, assuming filed separator is ',' (comma).

 awk -F, 'NR>2 { print $3 ; }' *.csv

Comments

[jimm-cl]

Provide a sample of the data in the files, to see what the delimiter is, the number of columns, etc... Also, what have you tried so far?

[terdon]

Hi and welcome to the site. Next time, please give us an example of your input and the output you want. It makes it much easier to understand what you need.

[Breevie]

removing headers isn't working