awk get specific colum

41down voteaccepted

Specify NR if you want to capture output from selected rows: awk 'NR==1{print $1}' /etc/*release An alternative (ugly) way of achieving the same would be: awk '{print $1; exit}' An efficient way of getting the first string from a specific line, say line 42, in the output would be: awk 'NR==42{print $1; exit}'