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
