You are in "one liner territory", but there is no real reason to do that - quoting rules between O/S's are different - just write a simple program and be done with it: 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

while (<DATA>)
{
   chomp;  # deletes line ending, 
           # If this is a file:
           # Windows,  Unix, Old Apple
           # <CR><LF>, <LF>, <CR> doesn't matter at all
           # Perl chomp() in text mode handles all that.
           
           # allows $zip to be used in future code
           # as index [3] without having to worry about
           # the line ending after the zip code...
   
   # assign name and city to index [0,2] respectively
   # using list slice

   # just split() upon the '|" character. 
   # many dataBsase export formats use '|' as a field separator.
   # instead of a "," to make the parsing easier.
   # "John Smith, Sr.", is harder than FIRST|LAST|TITLE

   #Now to be sure, there are fancy CSV modules that can
   #handle this complexity, but that does not appear to be
   #the case required here (commas within quotes can mean
   #different than the ones outside of quotes).
   
   my ($name, $city) = (split /\|/, $_)[0,2];
   print "$name",'|',$city,"\n";
}

=prints
NAME|CITY
AAA|STAT
BBB|PPOR
CCC|TRET
=cut

__DATA__
NAME|AGE|CITY|ZIP
AAA|23|STAT|60001
BBB|34|PPOR|12345
CCC|11|TRET|2345

[download]

In reply to Re: Better method to cut columns from delimited file by Marshall
in thread Better method to cut columns from delimited file by stevieb

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