Splitting a file into multiple files based on 1st column value

I have seen solutions of splitting a file with respect to pattern matching and line matching but what I want is the following.
The scenario is, let’s say I have a file file1 –

A.B|100|20
A.B|101|20
A.X|101|30
A.X|1000|20
B.Y|1|1

Now I want to split this file into 3 different files just based on the first column where the 1st file would be all the lines containing A.B in the first column, the 2nd file should have all the lines with A.X and so on.

If the first column changes in any way, there should be a new file created for those lines. Is there any way of doing it with bash or awk?

Since there is no way of actually knowing before hand what the first column value is, I wasn’t able to use any feature like split or cut. Thanks for the help in advance!

Answers:

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Method 1

Try:

awk -F| '{print>$1}' file1

This writes each line to a file named after the first column.

How it works:

• -F| sets the field separator to |.
• print>$1 prints the current line to a file whose name is the first field.

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