[bash] How to make the 'cut' command treat same sequental delimiters as one?

I'm trying to extract a certain (the fourth) field from the column-based, 'space'-adjusted text stream. I'm trying to use the cut command in the following manner:

cat text.txt | cut -d " " -f 4

Unfortunately, cut doesn't treat several spaces as one delimiter. I could have piped through awk

awk '{ printf $4; }'

or sed

sed -E "s/[[:space:]]+/ /g"

to collapse the spaces, but I'd like to know if there any way to deal with cut and several delimiters natively?

With versions of cut I know of, no, this is not possible. cut is primarily useful for parsing files where the separator is not whitespace (for example /etc/passwd) and that have a fixed number of fields. Two separators in a row mean an empty field, and that goes for whitespace too.

This Perl one-liner shows how closely Perl is related to awk:

perl -lane 'print $F[3]' text.txt

However, the @F autosplit array starts at index $F[0] while awk fields start with $1

shortest/friendliest solution

After becoming frustrated with the too many limitations of cut, I wrote my own replacement, which I called cuts for "cut on steroids".

cuts provides what is likely the most minimalist solution to this and many other related cut/paste problems.

One example, out of many, addressing this particular question:

$ cat text.txt
0   1        2 3
0 1          2   3 4

$ cuts 2 text.txt
2
2

cuts supports:

• auto-detection of most common field-delimiters in files (+ ability to override defaults)
• multi-char, mixed-char, and regex matched delimiters
• extracting columns from multiple files with mixed delimiters
• offsets from end of line (using negative numbers) in addition to start of line
• automatic side-by-side pasting of columns (no need to invoke paste separately)
• support for field reordering
• a config file where users can change their personal preferences
• great emphasis on user friendliness & minimalist required typing

and much more. None of which is provided by standard cut.

See also: https://stackoverflow.com/a/24543231/1296044

Source and documentation (free software): http://arielf.github.io/cuts/

As you comment in your question, awk is really the way to go. To use cut is possible together with tr -s to squeeze spaces, as kev's answer shows.

Let me however go through all the possible combinations for future readers. Explanations are at the Test section.

tr | cut

tr -s ' ' < file | cut -d' ' -f4

awk

awk '{print $4}' file

bash

while read -r _ _ _ myfield _
do
   echo "forth field: $myfield"
done < file

sed

sed -r 's/^([^ ]*[ ]*){3}([^ ]*).*/\2/' file

Tests

Given this file, let's test the commands:

$ cat a
this   is    line     1 more text
this      is line    2     more text
this    is line 3     more text
this is   line 4            more    text

tr | cut

$ cut -d' ' -f4 a
is
                        # it does not show what we want!


$ tr -s ' ' < a | cut -d' ' -f4
1
2                       # this makes it!
3
4
$

awk

$ awk '{print $4}' a
1
2
3
4

bash

This reads the fields sequentially. By using _ we indicate that this is a throwaway variable as a "junk variable" to ignore these fields. This way, we store $myfield as the 4th field in the file, no matter the spaces in between them.

$ while read -r _ _ _ a _; do echo "4th field: $a"; done < a
4th field: 1
4th field: 2
4th field: 3
4th field: 4

sed

This catches three groups of spaces and no spaces with ([^ ]*[ ]*){3}. Then, it catches whatever coming until a space as the 4th field, that it is finally printed with \1.

$ sed -r 's/^([^ ]*[ ]*){3}([^ ]*).*/\2/' a
1
2
3
4