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I have a text file with 9 fields separated by :

survey:m1111771::rent:travel:::Morning:

How do I pull field 1 and 8 only to a separate file

for example it would look like this,

survey:Morning
Jeff Schaller
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riley
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2 Answers2

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One of many ways:

$ awk -F: '{print $1":"$8}' <file>
survey:Morning

and as @cas as pointed out, where OFS is the "Output Field Separator"

$ awk -F: -v OFS=: '{print $1,$8}'
survey:Morning
KM.
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    hard-coding a single double-quoted `:` character is OK when you're only printing two fields, but it gets tedious and error-prone very quickly if you want to print more fields. It's better to set the Output Field Separator (OFS) to `:`. e.g. `awk -F: -v OFS=: '{print $1,$8}'`. hard-coding it is also a pain if you ever want to change it (e.g. to a tab or a comma), as you'd then have to manually change every occurrence. – cas May 19 '16 at 00:14
1

Another version using cut : 

cut -d: -f1,8 file > newfile
magor
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