awk field extraction in scripts in Bash Scripting - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Extracting Fields with awk in Bash Scripts

📖 Scenario: You have a text file with information about employees. Each line contains the employee's ID, name, and department separated by spaces.You want to write a bash script that extracts specific fields from each line using awk.

🎯 Goal: Build a bash script that reads the employee data and extracts the employee names using awk.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a text file variable with employee data

Create a variable for the field number to extract

Use awk to extract the specified field from each line

Print the extracted fields

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Extracting specific columns from text data is common when processing logs, reports, or CSV files in automation scripts.

💼 Career

Knowing how to use awk in bash scripts helps automate data extraction tasks in system administration, data analysis, and DevOps roles.

1

Create the employee data variable

Create a variable called employee_data that contains these exact three lines of text, each line separated by a newline character:
101 Alice Sales
102 Bob Marketing
103 Charlie IT

Bash Scripting

# Create the variable employee_data with the exact lines
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use double quotes and \n to separate lines inside the string.

2

Set the field number to extract

Create a variable called field_number and set it to 2 to represent the employee name field.

Bash Scripting

employee_data="101 Alice Sales\n102 Bob Marketing\n103 Charlie IT"
# Create the variable field_number and set it to 2
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Just assign the number 2 to the variable field_number.

3

Extract the specified field using awk

Use echo to send employee_data to awk. Use awk with the field variable field_number to extract that field from each line. Store the result in a variable called extracted_names.

Bash Scripting

employee_data="101 Alice Sales\n102 Bob Marketing\n103 Charlie IT"
field_number=2
# Use awk to extract the field_number field and save to extracted_names
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use awk -v field="$field_number" '{print $field}' to print the chosen field.

4

Print the extracted names

Print the variable extracted_names to display the extracted employee names.

Bash Scripting

employee_data="101 Alice Sales\n102 Bob Marketing\n103 Charlie IT"
field_number=2
extracted_names=$(echo -e "$employee_data" | awk -v field="$field_number" '{print $field}')
# Print the extracted_names variable
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use printf "%s\n" "$extracted_names" to print each name on its own line.