perl -lane "print $F[1]"
[download]

See perldoc perlrun.

Update: On Windows, you have to use double-quotes to enclose a command-line script. On Unix, there'll be a problem with the double-quotes and the dollar sign. Therefore, on Unix, I'd recommend using single-qoutes if possible; or otherwise, escape the dollar sign.

perl -lane "print $F[1]"

or if we're golfing here,

perl -lape'$_=$F[1]'
[download]

Dave.

Missed it by that much.</Maxwell Smart> YM $F[0]; awk's fields are 1-based ($0 being the entire line).

D'oh. Well, I'm not ashamed to admit my awk skills are a little rusty. Perl has been my text processing tool of first resort for the last... oh, 11 years. :-)

% cat try.awk
{print $1}
% a2p try.awk > try.perl
% cat try.perl
#!/usr/shell/bin/perl
eval 'exec perl -S $0 "$@"'
    if $running_under_some_shell;
                        # this emulates #! processing on NIH machines.
                        # (remove #! line above if indigestible)

eval '$'.$1.'$2;' while $ARGV[0] =~ /^([A-Za-z_0-9]+=)(.*)/ && shift;
                        # process any FOO=bar switches

$, = ' ';               # set output field separator
$\ = "\n";              # set output record separator

while (<>) {
    ($Fld1) = split(' ', $_, 9999);
    print $Fld1;
}
[download]

Except in this case. That's some pretty nasty perl for what it's trying to do. I've previously contemplated writing a module to somehow allow awk column sementics in perl... never quite got a round tuit though.

--
I'm not belgian but I play one on TV. On dit que je parle comme un belge aussi.

Inline::Awk gives you all the power (?!) of awk from within a Perl program:

    perl -le 'use Inline Awk=>q({print $1}); awk()' file
[download]

I agree with you that the output of a2p isn't pretty and it is probably not the best way for an awk programmer to learn Perl.

--
John.

perl -le 'print((split " ", "best ever")[0])'
[download]

Or, you could grab it with a regex.

perl -le '"best ever" =~ /(\w+)/; print $1'
[download]

Though I generally much prefer Perl to awk, in this case I prefer your awk one-liner above to the equivalent Perl one-liner -- if calling from a /bin/sh script. My main suggestion is to write the whole script, not in /bin/sh, but Perl; then you don't need all these little one-liners. The only time I write /bin/sh over Perl is for truly tiny scripts or when I need the script to run on a machine that does not have Perl installed.

You could use the utility described in this blog entry by Dominus.