The frawk implementation (not quite POSIX, but extremely fast) and my GoAWK implementation both have an "-i csv" option that puts it in "input mode CSV". More h

The frawk implementation (not quite POSIX, but extremely fast) and my GoAWK implementation both have an "-i csv" option that puts it in "input mode CSV". More here: https://benhoyt.com/writings/goawk-csv/ https://benhoyt.com/writings/goawk-csv/ $ cat quoted.csv "Smith, Bob",42 $ awk -F, '{ print $1 }' quoted.csv "Smith # you want to print the first field: Smith, Bob $ goawk -i csv '{ print $1 }' quoted.csv Smith, Bob # that's better!