awk automatically splits input into fields based on one or more sequence of space or tab or newline characters. In addition, any of these three characters at the start or end of input gets trimmed and won't be part of field contents. The fields are accessible using $N where N is the field number you need. You can also pass an expression instead of numeric literals to specify the field required.
Here are some examples:
$ cat table.txt
brown bread mat hair 42
blue cake mug shirt -7
yellow banana window shoes 3.14
# print the second field of each input line
$ awk '{print $2}' table.txt
bread
cake
banana
# print lines only if the last field is a negative number
$ awk '$NF<0' table.txt
blue cake mug shirt -7
# print the field as specified by the value stored in the 'f' variable
# -v option helps you set a value for the given variable
$ awk -v f=3 '{print $f}' table.txt
mat
mug
windowHere's an example of applying a substitution operation for a particular field.
# delete lowercase vowels only from the first field
# gsub() is like the sed substitution command with the 'g' flag
# use sub() if you need to change only the first match
# 1 is a true condition, and thus prints the contents of $0
$ awk '{gsub(/[aeiou]/, "", $1)} 1' table.txt
brwn bread mat hair 42
bl cake mug shirt -7
yllw banana window shoes 3.14