General :: Awk: Awking The Right Separator With Slashes - Colons - Commas (date Time And Data)

I wrote a hack script that outputs the following every so often: Code: 01/04/11 10:33:02: 97,1413,1447,2860 I must leave the data format the same --but I want a special number from it. In this case it's 97 and it's always going to be the first in the 4 columns of comma delimited items. I can extract with this:

Code: cat datafile | awk -F" " {'print $3'} | awk -F"," {'print $1'} But that's really sloppy. Can someone point out a better way of doing this (with awk) and tell me why?