AWK
The awk command is a very general pattern matching facility. One simple but useful capability is to pick out columns of text. This is particularly handy for manipulating tabular information such as in stimulus files. Syntax for selecting column N is:   awk '{print $N}' Note that the exact syntax (quotes and braces) must be used. Example: $ v="im*.nii.gz" $ echo $v   im1.nii.gz im2.nii.gz im3.nii.gz $ echo $v | awk '{print $2}'   im2.nii.gz