Take nth column in a text file

iirc :

cat filename.txt | awk '{ print $2 $4 }'

or, as mentioned in the comments :

awk '{ print $2 $4 }' filename.txt

You can use the cut command:

cut -d' ' -f3,5 < datafile.txt

prints

1657 19.6117
1410 18.8302
3078 18.6695
2434 14.0508
3129 13.5495

the

• -d' ' - mean, use space as a delimiter
• -f3,5 - take and print 3rd and 5th column

The cut is much faster for large files as a pure shell solution. If your file is delimited with multiple whitespaces, you can remove them first, like:

sed 's/[\t ][\t ]*/ /g' < datafile.txt | cut -d' ' -f3,5

where the (gnu) sed will replace any tab or space characters with a single space.

For a variant - here is a perl solution too:

perl -lanE 'say "$F[2] $F[4]"' < datafile.txt

For the sake of completeness:

while read -r _ _ one _ two _; do
    echo "$one $two"
done < file.txt

Instead of _ an arbitrary variable (such as junk) can be used as well. The point is just to extract the columns.

Demo:

$ while read -r _ _ one _ two _; do echo "$one $two"; done < /tmp/file.txt
1657 19.6117
1410 18.8302
3078 18.6695
2434 14.0508
3129 13.5495