Using multiple delimiters in awk

Good news! awk field separator can be a regular expression. You just need to use -F"<separator1>|<separator2>|...":

awk -F"/|=" -vOFS='\t' '{print $3, $5, $NF}' file

Returns:

tc0001  tomcat7.1  demo.example.com
tc0001  tomcat7.2  quest.example.com
tc0001  tomcat7.5  www.example.com

Here:

• -F"/|=" sets the input field separator to either / or =.

• -vOFS='\t' is using the -v flag for setting a variable. OFS is the default variable for the Output Field Separator and it is set to the tab character. The flag is necessary because there is no built-in for the OFS like -F.

• {print $3, $5, $NF} prints the 3rd, 5th and last fields based on the input field separator.

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See another example:

$ cat file
hello#how_are_you
i#am_very#well_thank#you

This file has two fields separators, # and _. If we want to print the second field regardless of the separator being one or the other, let's make both be separators!

$ awk -F"#|_" '{print $2}' file
how
am

Where the files are numbered as follows:

hello#how_are_you           i#am_very#well_thank#you
^^^^^ ^^^ ^^^ ^^^           ^ ^^ ^^^^ ^^^^ ^^^^^ ^^^
  1    2   3   4            1  2   3    4    5    6

The delimiter can be a regular expression.

awk -F'[/=]' '{print $3 "\t" $5 "\t" $8}' file

Produces:

tc0001   tomcat7.1    demo.example.com  
tc0001   tomcat7.2    quest.example.com  
tc0001   tomcat7.5    www.example.com