How to separate fields with pipe character delimiter

Question

I know this question has already been asked but no of the solution I've found worked for me! I have a program that has an output like this:

COUNT|293|1|lps

I'm interested in having the second field however no one of these tries worked:

./spawn 1 | cut -d '|' -f2
./spawn 1 | cut -d \| -f2
./spawn 1 | awk -F "|" '{print $2}'
./spawn 1 | awk 'BEGIN{FS="|"} {print $2}'
./spawn 1 | sed 's/|/;/g'
./spawn 1 | sed 's/\|/;/g'

But the output is always the same:

COUNT|293|1|lps

Is there a bug somewhere in bash? I would be surprised, the results is the same on my Linux host and on my embedded device using busybox's ash! Any pointer is strongly appreciated!

EDIT My fault, the output was in stderr ... ._.

./spawn 1 2>&1 | cut -d '|' -f2
4615

Sorry for ennoying!

Drugge

Just a guess, but is it possible that ./spawn 1 is printing to standard error instead of standard output? Does ./spawn 1 2>&1 | cut -d '|' -f2 work, for example? – Kittrell

Answer 1

Just repeating what I guessed in a comment as an answer, now that the questioner has confirmed that this is the problem.

The problem here is that ./spawn 1 is outputting to standard error, not standard output. You can redirect the output using 2>&1, so the following should work:

./spawn 1 2>&1 | cut -d '|' -f2

Kittrell

Answer 2

$ echo 'COUNT|293|1|lps' | cut -d'|' -f2
293

It works here.

Trixy