Hello echo hello1 192.168.1.9|awk 'BEGIN { FS = "." } ; { print $1"."$2"."$3}' hello1 192.168.1 I only need to pring the first three octats from the second field and delete the first field (hello1). The echo string is an output from a loop. Thanks

You can do: echo "hello1 192.168.1.9" | awk '{print $2}' | awk -F. '{ print $1"."$2"."$3}' Thanks.

I already have this in my script, I would like to change it to one line instead of a pipe to another awk statement?

echo hello1 192.168.1.9|awk 'BEGIN {FS="[. ]"};{print $2 "." $3 "." $4}' 192.168.1 Above, I set Field Separator to either a dot or a space. But one warning: The default field separation of white space allows any number of consecutive spaces/tabs to count as a single separator. But when setting FS like this, multiple consecutive spaces will be taken as multiple separators, so this can mess you up with additional null fields. And that is why I did not use the quotes on my echo command. The presence of quotes would preserve the extra spaces, but without the quotes, echo will output each operand with only one space between.

Thanks alot!!!