AWK to use multiple spaces as delimiter

Question

I am using below command to join two files using first two columns.

awk \'NR==FNR{a[$1,$2]=substr($0,3);next} ($1,$2) in a{print $0, a[$1,$2] > \"br0102_3.tx         


        

Answer 1

awk supports a regular expression as the value of FS so you can specify a regular expression that matches at least two spaces. Something like -F '[[:space:]][[:space:]]+'.

$ awk '{print NF}' File2
4
3
4

$ awk -F '[[:space:]][[:space:]]+' '{print NF}' File2
3
3
3