How to get the second column from command output?
Use -F [field separator] to split the lines on "s:
awk -F '"' '{print $2}' your_input_file
or for input from pipe
<some_command> | awk -F '"' '{print $2}'
output:
A B
C
D
If you could use something other than 'awk' , then try this instead
echo '1540 "A B"' | cut -d' ' -f2-
-d is a delimiter, -f is the field to cut and with -f2- we intend to cut the 2nd field until end.