Extracting columns

For a simple case without any comments.

     set col1 = `awk '{print $1}' fornax.dat`

Variable col1 is an array of the values of the first column. If you want an arbitrary column

     set col$j = `awk -v cn=$j '{print $cn}' fornax.dat`

where shell variable j is a positive integer and no more than the number of columns, returns the $j$th column in the shell array col$j$.

If there are comment lines to ignore, say beginning with # or *, the following excludes those from the array of values.

     set col$j = `awk -v cn=$j '$0!~/^[#*]/ {print $cn}' fornax.dat`

or you may want to exclude lines with alphabetic characters.

     set col2 = `awk '$0!~/[A-DF-Za-df-z]/ {print $2}' fornax.dat`

Notice that E and e are omitted to allow for exponents.