AWK substr
Substr is a neat little part of AWK.
I recently needed to get the first character of a column in a space separated file, and while there are a ton of ways to do this, I figured that Awk’s substr function would make the most sense.
substr(string, start, length): This will return length characters from string starting at position start. start is not zero-based, so 1 will be the first character, 2 will be the second, and so-on. On most systems, 0 still works for the first character, even though 1 will also return the first character.