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Should you have a CSV file, you may want to convert that into another form.

AWK can help there. Here's the basic AWK command for CSV files:

awk -v q="'" --field-separator ',' '{print q $1 $2 q}'

We're saying, be verbose -v, use ' as the variable q (sometimes this is useful) and separate the fields using ,.

Then the work in {} is where is all happens. In this case we're using print to print.

We're printing first and the second field with no spaces inbetween (either a blank place in double quotation marks or a comma will give a space). We also use q to add a single quotation mark.

For example, given this CSV data in sample.csv:

david,jones,mastermind
chris,buckly,ethereal spirit
duncan,christmas,postman

This awk command cat sample.csv | awk -v q="'" --field-separator ',' '{print q $3 "=" $1 q}' will output:

'mastermind=david'
'ethereal spirit=chris'
'postman=duncan'

If you use AWK's print to format a unix command, you can then pipe awk's output to bash and run that command.