Every line is called a record, and every word in a record is called a field. By default, words or fields are separated by whitespace, that is, Space or Tab. awk has an internal built-in variable called NF, which will keep track of field numbers. Typically, the maximum field number will be 100 and will depend on implementation. The following example has five records and four fields.
$1 $2 $3 $4
Bill Thomas 8000 08/9/1968
Fred Martin 6500 22/7/1982
Julie Moore 4500 25/2/1978
Marie Jones 6000 05/8/1972
Tom Walker 7000 14/1/1977
$ awk '{print NR, $1, $2, $4}' people.txt
The output will be:
1 Bill Thomas 08/9/1968
2 Fred Martin 22/7/1982
3 Julie Moore 25/2/1978
4 Marie Jones 05/8/1972
5 Tom Walker 14/1/1977
This has printed the record ...
