Re: cut - lack of --merge-delimiters option

[Dan Hipschman]

On Sun, Aug 31, 2008 at 10:52:13PM +0200, Jan Skowron wrote:
> regexp would slower CUT a little. Merging delimiters will be as quick
> as current CUT.
> AWK is bit slower too, slower to write comand, and slower to execute.
> 
> If you ask me, I would add to CUT regexp and merging delimiters, as
> separate options.
> 
> You've asked whats wrong with using AWK. Nothing is wrong, but CUT,
> TR, GREP, BC, JOIN and many more exists even if you can do anything
> with AWK.

By the way, merging delimiters can be done easily with

        tr -s ' ' | cut -d ' '

It is unlikely this option would be allowed in cut, then, as the tools
are designed to be small and used together.  Execution speed is probably
not a good enough reason.  If you wanted anything like this to run super
fast, the shell would not be an ideal solution.