Showing only relevant columns

Question

I have the following command.

(head -1 invoice.txt  && sed '1d' invoice.txt |sort -rn -k4,4) |column -ts $'\t' |less -S

• head -1 prints the first line.
• sed "1d' removes the first line so soft wont be confused
• sort -rn -k4,4 sorts my file by the 4th column only
• column -ts $'\t' splits the file by tab
• less -S prints it on the terminal

I would like to print only the first, fourth and last column. This is a small file however I have one with fourteen and one with twenty one columns, that i will use this template on.

And I am not sure if to use cut, awk, print or other command to pipe for my current output.

Answer 1

You want to show only the 1st, 4th and last tab-delimited columns, and you want to sort the data on the second of those columns numerically, ignoring the header.

awk -F '\t' 'BEGIN { OFS=FS } { print $1, $4, $NF }' invoice.txt >tmpfile

{
    head -n 1 tmpfile
    sed '1d' tmpfile | sort -k 2,2rn
} | less -S

Or, you could bypass the temporary file and just pass everything from awk into the { ...; } compound command via a pipe. Add column -ts $'\t' before less -S if needed.