How can I use a triple slash as a delimiter with cut?

Question

I have a table in which each entry looks something like,

coagulation factor VIII-associated 1 /// coagulation factor VIII-associated 2 /// coagulation factor VIII-associated 3

I would like to use cut -d/// -f2 myfile.txt, but I'm getting an error:

cut: bad delimiter

Same case when I use single quotes or double quotes around the delimiter:

cut -d'///' -f2 myfile.txt

cut -d"///" -f2 myfile.txt

Do I have to escape the slash somehow? If so, what is the escape character for cut? Documentation doesn't seem to have that information, and I tried \.

Answer 1

If the delimiter is anything other than one fixed character, then cut is the wrong tool.

Use awk instead.

Consider this test file which has three fields:

$ cat file
one///two/2//two///three

To print the second field and only the second field:

$ awk -F/// '{print $2}' file
two/2//two

Answer 2

The other answers are all right but there's also the possibility of replacing your current delimiter in order to use cut as you wanted such as:

sed "s/\/\/\//\//g" myfile.txt | cut -d/ -f2

Answer 3

A delimiter with cut is always a single character, so you can't specify "///" as a delimiter.

Instead, you'd use "/" as delimiter and count the extra fields:

cut -d/ -f4 myfile.txt

(fields 2 and 3 are the empty fields between the slashes in "///").