LINUX HACK 25

Hack 25. Cut Command

Cut command can be used to display only specific columns from a text file or other command outputs.

Following are some of the examples.

Display the 1^st  field (employee name) from a colon delimited file

$  cut  -d:  -f  1  names.txt

Emma  Thomas

Alex  Jason

Madison  Randy

Sanjay  Gupta

Nisha  Singh

Display 1^st  and 3^rd  field from a colon delimited file

$  cut  -d:  -f  1,3  names.txt

Emma  Thomas:Marketing

Alex  Jason:Sales

Madison  Randy:Product  Development

Sanjay  Gupta:Support

Nisha  Singh:Sales

Display only the first 8 characters of every line in a file

$  cut  -c  1-8  names.txt

Emma  Tho

Alex  Jas

Madison

Sanjay  G

Nisha  Si

Misc Cut command examples

o    cut -d: -f1 /etc/passwd Displays the unix login names for all the users in the system.

o    free | tr -s ' ' | sed '/^Mem/!d' | cut -d" " -f2 Displays the total memory available on the system.