I have a line of output with three quotes, and I specifically need to extract the second quote into a variable. So for example, with the command cmd | grep tokens, I get the following output:
Output
"abcde", "12345", "zyxwv"
I need to pull 12345 out of there. The closest I've gotten is by adding | cut '\"' -f2 to the command, but that returns "abcde". How can I get the second quote rather than the first?
Just improve your cut command. You're specifying the delimiter as " so count the fields before each ".
For example
Before the first " ther's nothing so:
$ echo "\"abcde\", \"12345\", \"zyxwv\"" | cut -d \" -f 1
[empty]
Before the second " is abcde
$ echo "\"abcde\", \"12345\", \"zyxwv\"" | cut -d \" -f2
abcde
Before the third " is ,
$ echo "\"abcde\", \"12345\", \"zyxwv\"" | cut -d \" -f3
,
So your expected output will be the fourth one
$ echo "\"abcde\", \"12345\", \"zyxwv\"" | cut -d \" -f4
12345
I hope the escape backslash don't mess you
We can simply do it with awk
eg:
[user@test ~]$ echo "abcde", "12345", "zyxwv" | awk -F"," '{print $2}' 12345
if the output is coming from a cmd then
var='
<cmd> | awk -F"," '{print $2}'
awk actually receives unquoted input due to the way you pass it with echo.
$( ... ) than backticks in any case.
Is this what you are trying to achieve?
variable=$(cmd | grep tokens | cut -d',' -f 2 | sed 's/ //')
sed substitution for those
echo Output tokens: "abcde", "12345", "zyxwv" | cut -d',' -f 2 | sed 's/ // and got 12345