Cut command can be used to display only specific columns from a text file or other command outputs.
Following are some of the examples.
Display the 1st field (employee name) from a colon delimited file
$ cut -d: -f 1 names.txt Emma Thomas Alex Jason Madison Randy Sanjay Gupta Nisha Singh
Display 1st and 3rd field from a colon delimited file
$ cut -d: -f 1,3 names.txt Emma Thomas:Marketing Alex Jason:Sales Madison Randy:Product Development Sanjay Gupta:Support Nisha Singh:Sales
Display only the first 8 characters of every line in a file
$ cut -c 1-8 names.txt Emma Tho Alex Jas Madison Sanjay G Nisha Si
Misc Cut command examples
Displays the unix login names for all the users in the system.
$ cut -d: -f1 /etc/passwd
Displays the total memory available on the system.
$ free | tr -s ' ' | sed '/^Mem/!d' | cut -d" " -f2
Comments on this entry are closed.
good examples…
Display only from the 3rd character on to the end of the line:
cut -c 3-$NF names.txt
Good Examples.. And give me more on -b and -s.
Thanks. Great job.
Can you use “abc” as a delimiter?
Thanks for the help.
@Hector
Try the argument -d”abc” in the cut command.
Simple and clear.. Thanks!
I have a line in my source code:
#define VERSION “0.1”
and wanted to insert it into the name of the tarball, I added:
`grep VERSION main.c | cut -d\” -f2`
into the Makefile. The backslash allows you to use the double quote as a delimiter. The back quote turns the results of the command into an insertable string.