Use space as a delimiter with cut command

Question

I want to use space as a delimiter with the cut command   What syntax can I use for this

User · Answer

scut  a cut-like utility  smarter but slower I made  that can use any perl regex as a breaking token  Breaking on whitespace is the default  but you can also break on multi-char regexes  alternative regexes  etc   scut -f  6 2 8 7   lt  input file   gt  output file   so the above command would break columns on whitespace and extract the  0-based  cols 6 2 8 7 in that order

User · Answer

I just discovered that you can also use  -d     cut  -d     Test    cat a hello how are you I am fine   cut  -d   -f2 a how am

User · Answer

You can t do it easily with cut if the data has for example multiple spaces  I have found it useful to normalize input for easier processing  One trick is to use sed for normalization as below   echo -e  foor t  t bar    sed  s  s    t g    cut -f2   bar

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To complement the existing  helpful answers  tip of the hat to QZ Support for encouraging me to post a separate answer   Two distinct mechanisms come into play here     a  whether cut itself requires the delimiter  space  in this case  passed to the -d option to be a separate argument or whether it s acceptable to append it directly to -d   b  how the shell generally parses arguments before passing them to the command being invoked     a  is answered by a quote from the POSIX guidelines for utilities  emphasis mine      If the SYNOPSIS of a standard utility shows an option with a mandatory option-argument       a conforming application shall use separate arguments for that option and its option-argument  However  a conforming implementation shall also permit applications to specify the option and option-argument in the same argument string without intervening  characters    In other words  In this case  because -d s option-argument is mandatory  you can choose whether to specify the delimiter as     s  EITHER  a separate argument   d  OR  as a value directly attached to -d    Once you ve chosen  s  or  d   it is the shell s string-literal parsing -  b  - that matters    With approach  s   all of the following forms are EQUIVALENT    -d     -d     -d   lt space gt      lt space gt  used to represent an actual space for technical reasons  With approach  d   all of the following forms are EQUIVALENT    -d    -d     -d    -d   d  lt space gt     The  equivalence is explained by the shell s string-literal processing   All solutions above result in the exact same string  in each group  by the time cut sees them      s   cut sees -d  as its own argument  followed by a separate argument that contains a space char - without quotes or   prefix    d   cut sees -d plus a space char - without quotes or   prefix  - as part of the same argument    The reason the forms in the respective groups are ultimately identical is twofold  based on how the shell parses string literals    The shell allows literal to be specified as is through a mechanism called quoting  which can take several forms    single-quoted strings  the contents inside       is taken literally and forms a single argument double-quoted strings  the contents inside       also forms a single argument  but is subject to interpolation  expands variable references such as  var  command substitutions         or         or arithmetic expansions                -quoting of individual characters  a   preceding a single character causes that character to be interpreted as a literal   Quoting is complemented by quote removal  which means that once the shell has parsed a command line  it removes the quote characters from the arguments  enclosing       or       or   instances  - thus  the command being invoked never sees the quote characters

User · Answer

cut -d     -f 2   Where 2 is the field number of the space-delimited field you want

User · Answer

Usually if you use space as delimiter  you want to treat multiple spaces as one  because you parse the output of a command aligning some columns with spaces   and the google search for that lead me here   In this case a single cut command is not sufficient  and you need to use   tr -s       cut -d     -f 2   Or   awk   print  2

User · Answer

I have an answer  I admit somewhat confusing answer  that involvessed  regular expressions and capture groups     S  - first word  s  - delimiter   S   - second word - captured    - rest of the line   As a sed expression  the capture group needs to be escaped  i e     and      The  1 returns a copy of the captured group  i e  the second word     echo  alpha beta gamma delta    sed  s  S  s    S       1   beta   When you look at this answer  its somewhat confusing  and  you may think  why bother  Well  I m hoping that some  may go  Aha   and will use this pattern to solve some complex text extraction problems with a single sed expression

User · Answer

You can also say   cut -d   -f 2   Note that there are two spaces after the backslash

[bash] Use space as a delimiter with cut command

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