Filtering the Xth element in a row?

Question

For example, I want to get only the 3rd element in each row when I call:

xinput --list --short|grep "slave  pointer"

I get the output:

⎜   ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer                id=4    [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad                id=11   [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ MCE IR Keyboard/Mouse (ite-cir)           id=12   [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ Logitech Unifying Device. Wireless PID:101a   id=14   [slave  pointer  (2)]

I would like to get only the names like "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad", ...

I saw somewhere a solution with awk and print somehow, but isn't there a simpler solution to achieve that without awk or perl or such?

Answer 1

Gawk is pretty simple for this kind of thing but OK, you can also use cut:

xinput --list --short|grep "slave  pointer" | cut -f 1

That will also include the leading space and ↳ characters. If you need to get rid of those, try this:

xinput --list --short|grep "slave  pointer" | cut -f 1 | cut -d" " -f 5-

Answer 2

If it were the third element, that would be "SynPS/2", not "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad"

The best you can achieve here is report what's before id= as it's the only thing that can identify where the device name ends.

xinput list | sed -n 's/^[ ⎜↳]*\(.*[^[:blank:]]\)[[:blank:]]*id=.*slave  pointer.*/\1/p'

Or with GNU grep built with PCRE support (-P option):

xinput list | grep -Po '[^ ⎜↳].*?(?=\s+id=.*slave  pointer)'