linux - Take nth column in a text file

Question

I have a text file:

1 Q0 1657 1 19.6117 Exp
1 Q0 1410 2 18.8302 Exp
2 Q0 3078 1 18.6695 Exp
2 Q0 2434 2 14.0508 Exp
2 Q0 3129 3 13.5495 Exp

I want to take the 2nd and 4th word of every line like this:

1657 19.6117
1410 18.8302
3078 18.6695
2434 14.0508
3129 13.5495

I'm using this code:

 nol=$(cat "/path/of/my/text" | wc -l)
 x=1
 while  [ $x -le "$nol" ]
 do
     line=($(sed -n "$x"p /path/of/my/text)
     echo ""${line[1]}" "${line[3]}""  >> out.txt
     x=$(( $x + 1 ))
 done

It works, but it is very complicated and takes a long time to process long text files.

Is there a simpler way to do this?

Answer 1

iirc :

cat filename.txt | awk '{ print $2 $4 }'

or, as mentioned in the comments :

awk '{ print $2 $4 }' filename.txt