awk tab delimited file parsing

I have a file containing data separated by tabs and it spans many
lines.  I want to extract only certain fields from each line.
Example:

data1     data2     data3     data4
data1     data2     data3     data4
...
...

I only want to extract data2 and data4 from each line.  I know that
awk is capable of this but don't know how.  Any comments and or
suggestions would be helpful.  Thanks, Monte.

Ed Morton <morton@lsupcaemnt.com> wrote in message news:<chl8u2$emg@netnews.proxy.lucent.co
m>...
> monte wrote: 
>
> awk -F"\t" '{print $2, $4}' file
>
> If the only spaces in the file are tabs, you don't even need the -F"\t".
>
> 	Ed.

Your solution worked, even for my second posting.  Thanks for
responding so soon Ed, I appreciate it.  Monte.

monte wrote:
> I have a file containing data separated by tabs and it spans many
> lines.  I want to extract only certain fields from each line.
> Example:
>
> data1     data2     data3     data4
> data1     data2     data3     data4
> ...
> ...
>
> I only want to extract data2 and data4 from each line.  I know that
> awk is capable of this but don't know how.  Any comments and or
> suggestions would be helpful.  Thanks, Monte.

awk -F"\t" '{print $2, $4}' file

If the only spaces in the file are tabs, you don't even need the -F"\t".

Ed.

Ed Morton <morton@lsupcaemnt.com> wrote in message news:<chl8u2$emg@netnews.proxy.lucent.co
m>...
> monte wrote: 
>
> awk -F"\t" '{print $2, $4}' file
>
> If the only spaces in the file are tabs, you don't even need the -F"\t".
>
> 	Ed.

Your solution worked, even for my second posting.  Thanks for
responding so soon Ed, I appreciate it.  Monte.