simple awk usage

note to self Once again, something i can't seem to hold in my mind, and end up searching for it over and over. Awk can be used in this way to filter out a field from a text file when the separator is a " " ( WHITE SPACE ) awk '{ print $n}' $n - is the field/column number This can also be used in many other things for example, -my favourite- to take out the leading white spaces on queue_ids from grep'd and cut'd ;-) postfix logs. Thanks dhaj for showing me this trick.