Usages of cut

cut command is really useful when it comes to table data handling.

For example, I have a comma-separated values file:

---- test.txt
John,Smith,34,London
Arthur,Evans,21,Newport
George,Jones,32,Truro

And for generating a special table containing only names and ages, I can execute this: cut -d',' -f 1,3 < test.txt. Expectedly here comes the result:

John,34
Arthur,21
George,32

In most cases, you need to specify 3 options to properly manipulate the efficient cut command.

Specifying Delimiter

We can use -d option to specify delimiter other than tab the default one. And the delimiter may be specified only when operating on fields(-f option).

Specifying LIST

cut can operate on fields, characters or bytes respectively with -f, -c and -b .

Specifying Range

Following the LIST option is the range, where you can specify a point (-c 3) or a consecutive range (-c 1-10) and you can combine those together with commas (-c 3,7-9,11).

Above, -c might be replaced with -f and -b for corresponding purpose.

By the way, bare it in mind that it is one-based numbering system the cut command is working with other than zero-based one.

There is a option --complement, which indicates complement of currently specified range as range.

For more examples, please refer to web page — Reference

bash, cut, linux, shell — Feb 12, 2019