I felt I had to respond to this post by Bradley Marshall on perl one-liners. My position as an awk advoate is a long-suffering one and one that could do with some updating :)
Given the following data set in a file:
foo:bar:baz
The following one-liner will pull it out in a useful fashion:
$ awk -F: '{print $2}' filea
bar
A neat extension is, given a dataset like:
1:2:3:4
5:6:7:8
You can use a one liner like the following:
$ awk -F: '{tot += $1};END{print tot}' fileb
6
I, for one, feel cleansed. Now wasn't that a touch easier and more legible? :) As always, see the awk manpage for more information...
Benjamin