Using the Cut Command in Linux to Select File Data

What is the Cut Command in Linux?

The Cut Command in Linux is a command line utility used for extracting sections of text from files and delimited data streams. It works similarly to the Unix/Linux ‘cut’ command, but with more features and flexibility. The Cut command can be used to extract data from strings, columns, fields, and delimited files, and output the data in a variety of formats.

How Does the Cut Command Work?

The Cut command takes a few different parameters that specify how it will process the input data. The parameters include the following:

• -c: specifies the character range or list of characters to cut out from the file.
• -d: specifies the delimiter character that separates the fields from each other.
• -f: specifies the field numbers to cut out from the file.

The Cut command will read input from either a file or from stdin (standard input). Once it reads in the data, it will process it based on the parameters given and output the desired result.

Examples of Using the Cut Command

Let’s look at some examples of using the Cut command.

Extracting Columns from a File

This example will extract the 3rd and 5th columns from a file named “example.txt”:

cut -d“ ” -f3,5 example.txt

Extracting Characters from a String

This example will extract characters 3 to 8 from a string:

echo “This is a test string” | cut -c3-8

The output of this command would be “s is a”.

Conclusion

The Cut command in Linux is an extremely versatile and powerful utility for extracting data from files and delimited data streams. It comes included with most Linux distributions, and makes it easy to quickly extract the information you need.