selecting columns in awk discarding corresponding header - awk

Question

How to properly select columns in awk after some processing. My file here:
cat foo
A;B;C
9;6;7
8;5;4
1;2;3
I want to add a first column with line numbers and then extract some columns of the result. For the example let's get the new first (line numbers) and third columns. This way:
awk -F';' 'FNR==1{print "linenumber;"$0;next} {print FNR-1,$1,$3}' foo
gives me this unexpected output:
linenumber;A;B;C
1 9 7
2 8 4
3 1 3
but expected is (note B is now the third column as we added linenumber as first):
linenumber;B
1;6
2;5
3;2
[fixed and revised]

Answer 1

To get your expected output, use:
$ awk 'BEGIN {
FS=OFS=";"
}
{
print (FNR==1?"linenumber":FNR-1),$(FNR==1?3:1)
}' file
Output:
linenumber;C
1;9
2;8
3;1
To add a column with line number and extract first and last columns, use:
$ awk 'BEGIN {
FS=OFS=";"
}
{
print (FNR==1?"linenumber":FNR-1),$1,$NF
}' file
Output this time:
linenumber;A;C
1;9;7
2;8;4
3;1;3

Answer 2

Why do you print $0 (the complete record) in your header? And, if you want only two columns in your output, why to you print 3 (FNR-1, $1 and $3)? Finally, the reason why your output field separators are spaces instead of the expected ; is simply that... you did not specify the output field separator (OFS). You can do this with a command line variable assignment (OFS=\;), as shown in the second and third versions below, but also using the -v option (-v OFS=\;) or in a BEGIN block (BEGIN {OFS=";"}) as you wish (there are differences between these 3 methods but they don't matter here).
[EDIT]: see a generic solution at the end.
If the field you want to keep is the second of the input file (the B column), try:
$ awk -F\; 'FNR==1 {print "linenumber;" $2; next} {print FNR-1 ";" $2}' foo
linenumber;B
1;6
2;5
3;2
or
$ awk -F\; 'FNR==1 {print "linenumber",$2; next} {print FNR-1,$2}' OFS=\; foo
linenumber;B
1;6
2;5
3;2
Note that, as long as you don't want to keep the first field of the input file ($1), you could as well overwrite it with the line number:
$ awk -F\; '{$1=FNR==1?"linenumber":FNR-1; print $1,$2}' OFS=\; foo
linenumber;B
1;6
2;5
3;2
Finally, here is a more generic solution to which you can pass the list of indexes of the columns of the input file you want to print (1 and 3 in this example):
$ awk -F\; -v cols='1;3' '
BEGIN { OFS = ";"; n = split(cols, c); }
{ printf("%s", FNR == 1 ? "linenumber" : FNR - 1);
for(i = 1; i <= n; i++) printf("%s", OFS $(c[i]));
printf("\n");
}' foo
linenumber;A;C
1;9;7
2;8;4
3;1;3