I wanted to ask why not the more simple form: echo '"foo","bar,baz","boo"' | awk -F"\",\"" '{print $1}' "foo echo '"foo","bar,baz","boo"' | awk -F"\",\"" '{pr

I wanted to ask why not the more simple form: echo '"foo","bar,baz","boo"' | awk -F"\",\"" '{print $1}' "foo echo '"foo","bar,baz","boo"' | awk -F"\",\"" '{print $2}' bar,baz echo '"foo","bar,baz","boo"' | awk -F"\",\"" '{print $3}' boo" Realizing that I have to strip the quotes that remain. Edit. formatting. EDit, again, from your link, the following is more terse and too my taste (still needs strips): awk -v FPAT='("[^"]*")+'