Problem scenario
You run a command such as this, with the goal of printing the number of occurrences of "foo":
grep -icR foo * | awk '{fs=":"; print $2}'
It does not do what you want it to do. You want the field separator to be a colon. It is not working. How do you print the element after a ":" (colon) with an awk utility?
Solution
Technically awk is a programming language; but it is also a utility. Use this command instead:
grep -icr foo * | awk --field-separator=":" '{print $2}'
The syntax above uses awk in a different way to recognize the ":" (colon) as a field separator. With the "--field-separator" syntax above, replacing the colon with a semicolon will allow you use to use a semicolon as a field separator too.