What does the command awk '{print $1}' <(ll) <(cat /etc/passwd) do?

• A. It prints only the first column from /etc/passwd.
• B. It prints the second column from the outputs.
• C. It prints the entire lines from both commands.
• D. It prints the first column from the output of ll and the first column from the output of /etc/passwd.

Answer: (D)

The command relies on process substitution to feed two command outputs into one awk run, and awk prints the first field of each input line. Since you’re passing two inputs, you get the first field from every line of the first command’s output (the first column shown by ll) and then the first field from every line of the second command’s output (the first column of /etc/passwd, i.e., the username). In short, it outputs the first column from the ll output followed by the first column from the passwd output.