Parsing CSV at the command line with `csvcut`

Parsing csv at the command line is easy with the csvcut tool from csvkit.

csvkit is installable with pip

> pip install csvcut 

You can print only the columns you are interested in.

> echo "a,b,c,d" | csvcut -c 1,4
a,d
> echo "a,b,c,d" | csvcut -c 1,5
Column 5 is invalid. The last column is 'd' at index 4.

It also handles quoted csv columns:

echo 'a,"1,2,3,4",c,d' | csvcut -c 2,3

It handles new lines:

> echo 'a,b\nc,d' | csvcut -c 2
b
d

There are a virtual plethora of options check out csvcut --help.

csvkit has a number of csv processing tools, check them out here.