awk '{print $1}' file
will print first word in every line of file.
I will probably put any and all discussions of using CAT AWK and SED on this page.
5) To count the lines in a file:
$ awk 'END { print NR }' geeksforgeeks.txt
print any non empty line if present $ awk 'NF < 0' geeksforgeeks.txt