cut command with examples

You may often need to slit a file in such way that output should be only some or few columns.
 Unix/ Linux comes with powerful sword for this and its called cut ( the name is simple to guess )

Lets consider following file for this example:



now if you want to see first character of each row, in other words if you want to "slit vertically  in such a way that you only see red highlighted part of the file, you should try to play with cut




                                                                                               
                                                                                                                                              and that is how you do it





you can even specify range off characters, see below two examples


and off course you can join two different range of characters as well, hope below example will explain you this





Now if you don't know the end of your files that means if you don't know, how many numbers of characters each row is having and still you want to see the all characters till end, starting with certain character numbers
of each line use "-"  as below  ( starting from 9th character in this case )



cut command is quite versatile it even works with delimiter, all you have to do specify delimiter ( see red highlighted part ) and name the fields you want want to based on delimiter you specified



Few more examples :

you can specify more then one field 





and range of fields too



                                                                                                                                                              you must have observed the difference between cut -d "," -f1,3 Example-1.txt and cut -d "," -f1-3 Example-1.txt , in first case it only prints specified columns (1st and 3rd)  in second case it prints range of column ( 1st to 3rd ).





I am concluding this post here , cut is a great text formatting tool when used with some other unix commands, I will discuss them in my future posts
Thanks for reading , have a nice day :)  




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