How can I extract the columns from a text file and save that into another text file?

Question

Suppose, I have a file called source.txt which has the following data in it:

3LWXA       199  XRAY        1.100    0.12    0.14
3LX3A       180  XRAY        1.550    0.15    0.17
3LY0A       364  XRAY        1.399    0.17    0.19
3LYDA       161  XRAY        1.450    0.17    0.19
3LYEA       307  XRAY        1.300    0.13    0.17
3LYHB       126  XRAY        1.600    0.17    0.21
3LYPA       215  XRAY        1.600    0.18    0.21
3M07A       618  XRAY        1.400    0.15    0.17
3M0FA       213  XRAY        1.600    0.21    0.22

I want to extract {1st} and {1st, 2nd} columns from source.txt and save them into one.txt and two.txt.

How can I do that?

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N.B. I found this thread but that didn't help.

Answer 1

Try also

awk '{print $1 > "one.txt"; print $1,$2 > "two.txt"}' source.txt

Answer 2

Use awk.

awk '{ print $1 }' source.txt > one.txt
awk '{ print $1,  $2 }' source.txt > two.txt

Answer 3

With GNU sed utilizing it's extended regex features enabled (-E), we can use the following:

sed -En 's/\S+/&\n/2
  s/\n.*//wfile2
  s/\s.*//wfile1
' file

Answer 4

Can also do with cut command:

cat source.txt | sed 's/[ ]\+/:/g' | cut -d ":" -f 1 > one.txt
cat source.txt | sed 's/[ ]\+/:/g' | cut -d ":" -f 1-2 | tr ":" " " > two.txt

Answer 5

#!/usr/bin/python
import re
res=re.compile(r'\s+')
fil=open('source.txt','r')
firs=open('one.txt','w')
sec=open('two.txt','w')
for f in fil:
    splitcomp=re.sub(res," ",f).strip().split(' ')
    firs.write(splitcomp[0].strip() + "\n")
    seondfilecon="{0}\t{1}".format(splitcomp[0],splitcomp[1])
    sec.write(seondfilecon.strip()+"\n")