awk: line 1: syntax error at or near ,

Question

I try to use the awk command on my file in dpkg and I get that error:

awk  '{print $1,$6}' cmd.txt > cmd2.txt

File content:

Port         Protocol Type              Board Name                FQBN             Core       
/dev/ttyACM0 serial   Serial Port (USB) Unknown                                               
/dev/ttyACM1 serial   Serial Port (USB) Arduino Mega or Mega 2560 arduino:avr:mega arduino:avr
/dev/ttyAMA0 serial   Serial Port       Unknown                                               
/dev/ttyAMA1 serial   Serial Port       Unknown                                               
/dev/ttyAMA2 serial   Serial Port       Unknown                                               
/dev/ttyAMA3 serial   Serial Port       Unknown                                               
/dev/ttyS0   serial   Serial Port       Unknown                                               
/dev/ttyUSB0 serial   Serial Port (USB) Unknown                                               
/dev/ttyUSB1 serial   Serial Port (USB) Unknown                                               
/dev/ttyUSB2 serial   Serial Port (USB) Unknown                                               
/dev/ttyUSB3 serial   Serial Port (USB) Unknown

It seems in dpkg, there are different behaviors. Can someone give me an advice.

Edit: My ideal case

arduino-cli board list | awk -F ' ' '{print $1,$6}' |while read var1 var2
do
  if [ "$var2" == "Arduino" ];then
      device_path=$var1
      dosomething...
      break;
  fi
done

Answer 1

Awk works with record delimiters (i.e. space, coma, semicolon...). Your input file is not with delimiters, is presented as columns formatting. And unfortunately, some data columns (3 and 4) contain spaces.

You could use this

cut -c 1-13,84- cmd.txt > cmd2.txt

or this:

awk  '{print substr($0,1,12) " " substr($0,84)}' cmd.txt > cmd2.txt

The big problem with those solutions, that the length of each column!

But, it's possible to determine the lengths:

Awk script file columns.awk:

#! /usr/bin/awk -f

BEGIN {
    COLS[++NB_COLS] = "Port"
    COLS[++NB_COLS] = "Protocol"
    COLS[++NB_COLS] = "Type"
    COLS[++NB_COLS] = "Board Name"
    COLS[++NB_COLS] = "FQBN"
    COLS[++NB_COLS] = "Core"
}
NR == 1 {
    for (COL in COLS) {
        START_COL[COL] = index($0, COLS[COL])
        if (COL > 1) {
            LEN_COL[COL - 1] = START_COL[COL] - START_COL[COL - 1] - 1
        }
    }
    LEN_COL[NB_COLS]=length($0)
}
{
    print substr($0, START_COL[1], LEN_COL[1]) " " substr($0, START_COL[6], LEN_COL[6])
}

With:

chmod 755 columns.awk

Used like:

./columns.awk cmd.txt > cmd2.txt

cmd2.txt file content:

Port         Core
/dev/ttyACM0 
/dev/ttyACM1 arduino:avr
/dev/ttyAMA0 
/dev/ttyAMA1 
/dev/ttyAMA2 
/dev/ttyAMA3 
/dev/ttyS0   
/dev/ttyUSB0 
/dev/ttyUSB1 
/dev/ttyUSB2 
/dev/ttyUSB3