Using multiple delimiters in awk

I have a file which contain following lines:

/logs/tc0001/tomcat/tomcat7.1/conf/catalina.properties:app.env.server.name = demo.example.com
/logs/tc0001/tomcat/tomcat7.2/conf/catalina.properties:app.env.server.name = quest.example.com
/logs/tc0001/tomcat/tomcat7.5/conf/catalina.properties:app.env.server.name = www.example.com

In above output I want to extract 3 fields (Number 2, 4 and the last one *.example.com). I am getting the following output:

cat file | awk -F'/' '{print $3 "\t" $5}'
tc0001   tomcat7.1
tc0001   tomcat7.2
tc0001   tomcat7.5

How do I also extract last field with domain name which is after '='? How do I use multiple delimiter to extract field?

Solution 1:

The delimiter can be a regular expression.

awk -F'[/=]' '{print $3 "\t" $5 "\t" $8}' file

Produces:

tc0001   tomcat7.1    demo.example.com  
tc0001   tomcat7.2    quest.example.com  
tc0001   tomcat7.5    www.example.com

Solution 2:

Good news! awk field separator can be a regular expression. You just need to use -F"<separator1>|<separator2>|...":

awk -F"/|=" -vOFS='\t' '{print $3, $5, $NF}' file

Returns:

tc0001  tomcat7.1  demo.example.com
tc0001  tomcat7.2  quest.example.com
tc0001  tomcat7.5  www.example.com

Here:

• -F"/|=" sets the input field separator to either / or =.

• -vOFS='\t' is using the -v flag for setting a variable. OFS is the default variable for the Output Field Separator and it is set to the tab character. The flag is necessary because there is no built-in for the OFS like -F.

• {print $3, $5, $NF} prints the 3rd, 5th and last fields based on the input field separator.

See another example:

$ cat file
hello#how_are_you
i#am_very#well_thank#you

This file has two fields separators, # and _. If we want to print the second field regardless of the separator being one or the other, let's make both be separators!

$ awk -F"#|_" '{print $2}' file
how
am

Where the files are numbered as follows:

hello#how_are_you           i#am_very#well_thank#you
^^^^^ ^^^ ^^^ ^^^           ^ ^^ ^^^^ ^^^^ ^^^^^ ^^^
  1    2   3   4            1  2   3    4    5    6