That is correct, the data needs to be simple where the delimiter characters are never embedded inside a quoted field. I wrote a simple (and fast) utility to ens

That is correct, the data needs to be simple where the delimiter characters are never embedded inside a quoted field. I wrote a simple (and fast) utility to ensure that CSV files are handled properly by all the standard UNIX command line data tools. If you like using awk, sed, cut, tr, etc. then it may be useful to you. <https://github.com/dbro/csvquote https://github.com/dbro/csvquote> Using it with the first example command from this article would be csvquote file.csv | awk -F, '{print $1}' | csvquote -u By using the "-u" flag in the last step of the pipeline, all of the problematic quoted delimiters get restored.