use awk to print a column, adding a comma - awk

Question

I have a file, from which I want to retrieve the first column, and add a comma between each value.
Example:
AAAA 12345 xccvbn
BBBB 43431 fkodks
CCCC 51234 plafad
to obtain
AAAA,BBBB,CCCC
I decided to use awk, so I did
awk '{ $1=$1","; print $1 }'
Problem is: this add a comma also on the last value, which is not what I want to achieve, and also I get a space between values.
How do I remove the comma on the last element, and how do I remove the space? Spent 20 minutes looking at the manual without luck.

Answer 1

$ awk '{printf "%s%s",sep,$1; sep=","} END{print ""}' file
AAAA,BBBB,CCCC
or if you prefer:
$ awk '{printf "%s%s",(NR>1?",":""),$1} END{print ""}' file
AAAA,BBBB,CCCC
or if you like golf and don't mind it being inefficient for large files:
$ awk '{r=r s $1;s=","} END{print r}' file
AAAA,BBBB,CCCC

Answer 2

awk {'print $1","$2","$3'} file_name
This is the shortest I know

Answer 3

Why make it complicated :) (as long as file is not too large)
awk '{a=NR==1?$1:a","$1} END {print a}' file
AAAA,BBBB,CCCC
For better porability.
awk '{a=(NR>1?a",":"")$1} END {print a}' file

Answer 4

You can do this:
awk 'a++{printf ","}{printf "%s", $1}' file
a++ is interpreted as a condition. In the first row its value is 0, so the comma is not added.
EDIT:
If you want a newline, you have to add END{printf "\n"}. If you have problems reading in the file, you can also try:
cat file | awk 'a++{printf ","}{printf "%s", $1}'

Answer 5

awk 'NR==1{printf "%s",$1;next;}{printf "%s%s",",",$1;}' input.txt
It says: If it is first line only print first field, for the other lines first print , then print first field.
Output:
AAAA,BBBB,CCCC

Answer 6

In this case, as simple cut and paste solution
cut -d" " -f1 file | paste -s -d,

Answer 7

In case somebody as me wants to use awk for cleaning docker images:
docker image ls | grep tag_name | awk '{print $1":"$2}'

Answer 8

Surpised that no one is using OFS (output field separator). Here is probably the simplest solution that sticks with awk and works on Linux and Mac: use "-v OFS=," to output in comma as delimiter:
$ echo '1:2:3:4' | awk -F: -v OFS=, '{print $1, $2, $4, $3}' generates:
1,2,4,3
It works for multiple char too:
$ echo '1:2:3:4' | awk -F: -v OFS=., '{print $1, $2, $4, $3}' outputs:
1.,2.,4.,3

Answer 9

Using Perl
$ cat group_col.txt
AAAA 12345 xccvbn
BBBB 43431 fkodks
CCCC 51234 plafad
$ perl -lane ' push(#x,$F[0]); END { print join(",",#x) } ' group_col.txt
AAAA,BBBB,CCCC
$

Answer 10

This can be very simple like this:
awk -F',' '{print $1","$1","$2","$3}' inputFile
where input file is : 1,2,3
2,3,4 etc.

Answer 11

I used the following, because it lists the api-resource names with it, which is useful, if you want to access it directly. I also use a label "application" to find specific apps in a namespace:
kubectl -n ops-tools get $(kubectl api-resources --no-headers=true --sort-by=name | awk '{printf "%s%s",sep,$1; sep=","}') -l app.kubernetes.io/instance=application