Awk help
 

Hi All,

I have a file "host" with three columns in it like below and i tried below double FOR loop to print 1 column in one iteration. i use two/three ways but all fails with no error/output. please let me know where i am wrong. please suggest if there is any other way to do this.

file with 3 columns
a b c
a b c
a b c
a b c
a b c
.
.
.


method 1

for i in 1 2 3
do
for HOSTS in `awk -v var=$i '{print var}' host|grep -i VHL..WX|sed 's/^#//'`
do
echo $HOSTS
............
............
............
done
done

method 2

for i in 1 2 3
do
for HOSTS in `awk '{print var}' var=$i host|grep -i VHL..WX|sed 's/^#//'`
do
echo $HOSTS
............
.............
...............
done
done

If file t.t contains data as above, then
dumps first col only.

Probably 'cut' command can also be used:

$ cut -d" " -f1 file.txt

Only first column should be printed out.

Possibly, but cut requires exactly 1 char (in this case space) as the delimiter; awk uses any amt of contiguous whitespace, so a bit more flexible.
Without code tags we can't be sure of the data spacing ;)