Retrieving Fields from a CSV File | Tools for a Systems Administrator | Exam XK0-004: CompTIA Linux+

CSV File Retrieval Tools

Question

A systems administrator needs to retrieve specific fields from a CSV file.

Which of the following tools would accomplish this task?

Answers

Explanations

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A.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19602181/how-to-extract-one-column-of-a-csv-file

The tool that would be best suited for retrieving specific fields from a CSV file is "awk."

Awk is a powerful command-line tool for manipulating text files that is included in most Linux distributions. It is designed to search and process text files, with a focus on pattern matching and data extraction. It is commonly used to extract specific fields from a file, as well as for data processing, formatting, and reporting.

In the case of a CSV file, awk can be used to extract specific fields using the delimiter (usually a comma). For example, if we have a CSV file with the following data:

Name, Age, Gender John, 30, Male Jane, 25, Female Bob, 45, Male

We could use the following awk command to extract only the Name and Gender fields:

swift
awk -F, '{print $1, $3}' file.csv

This command tells awk to use the comma (",") as the field separator (-F), and to print out the first and third fields ($1 and $3) from the file "file.csv". The output would look like this:

Name Gender John Male Jane Female Bob Male

In contrast, the other options listed are not as well suited for this task:

  • "sort" is used for sorting text files and does not have the capability to extract specific fields from a CSV file.
  • "print" is not a command-line tool or utility, but rather a function or keyword used within programming languages like Python or C++ to display output to the console.
  • "echo" is used to print a message or variable to the console, but is not used for data extraction or manipulation.