Unix cut command: Reference and Examples

WIP Alert This is a work in progress. Current information is correct but more content may be added in the future.

Split by delimiter

Template: cut -d\<delimiter\> -f\<part-to-extract\>

Example: split the string "foo bar baz"

• Extract the first part

  $ echo "foo bar baz" | cut -d' ' -f1
  # outputs "foo"
  

• Extract the third part

  $ echo "foo bar baz" | cut -d' ' -f3
  # outputs "bar"
  

• Extract the sixth part (oops)

  $ echo "foo bar baz" | cut -d' ' -f6
  # outputs nothing because there aren't 6 parts available
  

Split on one or more spaces

This is useful to parse the output of ls, because the output is not evenly spaced

Use tr first and pipe the result to cut:

$ echo "foo     bar   baz" | tr -s ' ' | cut -d' ' -f2
# outputs "bar"

Example: parse the output of ls -lha:

• original command output

  $ ls -lha ~/ | grep profile
  -rw-rw-r--   1 felipe felipe  200 Abr 21  2017 .bash_profile
  -rw-r--r--   1 felipe felipe 1000 Jul  5 05:21 .profile
  

• Extract the month name (6th block, so use -f6)

  $ ls -lha ~/ | grep profile | tr -s ' ' | cut -d' ' -f6
  Abr
  Jul