I have a tab delimited file with some fields potentially containing no data. In ksh 'read' though treats multiple tabs as a single delimiter. Is there any way to change that behavior so I could have blank data too? I.e. When encountering 2 tabs it would take it as a null field? Or do I have to use awk?
vs.
The shell version will output the wrong field if the 1st or 2nd record is blank.
Code:
# where <TAB> would be a real tab:
while IFS="<TAB>" read a b c d; do echo $c; done < file.txtCode:
awk -F"\t" '{print $3}' file.txt
