Usually, when I use awk for text processing, I prefer to use the awk -F option for text field separation.
Of course, we can also use the combination of BEGIN and FS to achieve the same goal.
Let’s take a look at their use examples.
awk -F
➜ echo "abc:123:dffff:xxo" | awk -F":" '{print $1}'
awk ‘BEGIN{FS=”:”}’
➜ echo "abc:123:dffff:xxo" | awk 'BEGIN{FS=":"}{print $1}'