We have already discussed that an input field separator is a whitespace by default. We can change this IFS to other values on the command line or by using the BEGIN statement. We need to use the -F option to change the IFS.
This is an example:
$ cat people.txt
The output will be as follows:
Bill Thomas:8000:08/9/1968 Fred Martin:6500:22/7/1982 Julie Moore:4500:25/2/1978 Marie Jones:6000:05/8/1972 Tom Walker:7000:14/1/1977 $ awk -F: '/Marie/{print $1, $2}' people.txt
The output will be as follows:
Marie Jones 6000
We have used the -F option to specify colon (:) as IFS instead of the default, IFS. Therefore, it has printed field 1 and 2 of the records in which the Marie pattern was matched. We can even specify ...