Thanks for reporting this bug and taking the time to help make Ubuntu better!
Unfortunately what you are experiencing is a quirk of how awk works [of which there are many :)]. Field separators are only used for the next line after they are set. To get around this you can use the BEGIN pattern to do this before the first line is read into the awk interpreter -- example given below. awk 'BEGIN {FS=","} {print $2","$5","$14","$17","$20","$23","$26","$29","$32","$35","$77","$78","$79","$80","$81","$82","$83","$84","$85","$86","$87","$88","$89","$90","$91","$92","$93","$94","$95","$96","$97","$98}' I tested against mawk as well as busybox's awk which both do the same thing. While this is nonintuitive, it is expected behavior. I am marking this bug as "won't fix", please comment if you believe I am mistaken. Thanks again! ** Changed in: mawk (Ubuntu) Status: New => Won't Fix -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1329736 Title: When specifying a field separator with {FS=","}, the separator is not applied to the first line To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mawk/+bug/1329736/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs