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Re: Basic usage question involving "cut"
From: |
Pádraig Brady |
Subject: |
Re: Basic usage question involving "cut" |
Date: |
Tue, 01 Aug 2006 10:54:56 +0100 |
User-agent: |
Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.8 (X11/20060502) |
Linda Walsh wrote:
> Don't know if this is the appropriate place for this, but if it
> isn't possible, I could "suggest" that it might be considered a
> bug or at least a "design deficiency". :-)
>
> Something that's always bothered me about "cut". It seems it has
> at least two ways to define fields, that I'm aware of: defining
> by character position and defining by a delimiter.
>
> What I don't know how to do is how to select a "whitespace"
> delimited field. It's one of the more common field delimiters I
> run into. The easiest, but rather inefficient methods is to
> pipe the input into a shell-based "while read field1, field2..."
> loop, but it sure would make sense if there was an option
> to "cut" to handle white-space delimited fields.
>
> Is there an option to "cut" that I don't know about, or am I
> looking in the wrong place for this type of functionality,
> or is this a feature "deficit", in "cut", that needs remedying?
That is a deficiency IMHO. For all the coreutils
there should be a way to specify which fields,
delimters defaulting to runs of whitespace, but
one can specify delimiters also.
sort supports this, and a lot of other utils
will probably get this functionality at some stage.
For a work around, see the comments at the top of:
http://www.pixelbeat.org/scripts/add
Pádraig.