Re: say that cut can't handle more than one field demarcator

[Pádraig Brady]

On 05/03/10 01:31, Pádraig Brady wrote:
> On 04/03/10 20:05, address@hidden wrote:
> > On (info "(coreutils) cut invocation") please add:
> > cut has no way to specify a group of blanks as a field demarcator.
> > If you want that, use perl -a. Also use perl's split if you want
> > regexp demarcators, etc.
> > If that is indeed the case.
>
> Actually using tr from coreutils you can do:
>
> tr -s '[:blank:]' '\t' | cut -f5
>
> In fact I thought I had already added that to
> the info docs. I had intended adding it at least,
> but obviously I misremembered checking it in.
> I'll do that very soon.

I'll push this to coreutils.texi (cut invocation) soon:

`-f FIELD-LIST'
`--fields=FIELD-LIST'
     ..............................................  Note `cut' does
     not support specifying runs of whitespace as a delimiter, so to
     achieve that common functionality one can pre-process with `tr'
     like:
          tr -s '[:blank:]' '\t' | cut -f...

cheers,
Pádraig.