Questions tagged [cut]
For questions pertaining to cut, a filter program which extracts fields or columns of each line of input. Use this tag for questions about cut itself or questions about issues arising from using the cut utility.
438
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How to define 'tab' delimiter with 'cut' in Bash?
Here is an example of using cut to break input into fields using a space delimiter, and obtaining the second field:
cut -f2 -d' '
How can the delimiter be defined as a tab, instead of a space?
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10
answers
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How do I use cut to separate by multiple whitespace?
I have this input, which is displayed in columns. I would like to get the second last column with the numbers of this sample:
[ 3] 1.0- 2.0 sec 1.00 MBytes 8.39 Mbits/sec
[ 3] 2.0- 3.0 sec 768 ...
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6
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Replace multiple spaces with one using 'tr' only
I have a file, f1.txt:
ID Name
1 a
2 b
3 g
6 f
The number of spaces is not fixed. What is the best way to replace all the white spaces with one space using only tr?
...
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95
votes
1
answer
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How to truncate text lines to N characters maximum? [duplicate]
Given a text file, or the output of a command, how can I truncate it so that every line longer than N characters (usually N=80 in a terminal) gets shorten to N characters maximum?
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get first X characters from the cat command?
I have a text file I'm outputting to a variable in my shell script. I only need the first 50 characters however.
I've tried using cat ${filename} cut -c1-50 but I'm getting far more than the first ...
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65
votes
2
answers
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Counting occurrences of word in text file
I have a text file containing tweets and I'm required to count the number of times a word is mentioned in the tweet. For example, the file contains:
Apple iPhone X is going to worth a fortune
The ...
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57
votes
3
answers
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How to cut (select) a field from text line counting from the end?
I know how to select a field from a line using the cut command. For instance, given the following data:
a,b,c,d,e
f,g,h,i,j
k,l,m,n,o
This command:
cut -d, -f2 # returns the second field of the ...
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46
votes
8
answers
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How to use grep and cut in script to obtain website URLs from an HTML file
I am trying to use grep and cut to extract URLs from an HTML file. The links look like:
<a href="http://examplewebsite.com/">
Other websites have .net, .gov, but I assume I could make the cut ...
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45
votes
3
answers
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What are the exact differences between awk and cut with grep? [closed]
We know that we can get the second column of the line we want from a file using these two techniques:
awk '/WORD/ { print $2 }' filename
or
grep WORD filename| cut -f 2 -d ' '
My questions are:
...
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42
votes
12
answers
239k
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A command to print only last 3 characters of a string
I know that the cut command can print the first n characters of a string but how to select the last n characters?
If I have a string with a variable number of characters, how can I print only the ...
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41
votes
5
answers
38k
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How to get last part of http link in Bash?
I have an http link :
http://www.test.com/abc/def/efg/file.jar
and I want to save the last part file.jar to variable, so the output string is "file.jar".
Condition: link can has different length ...
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31
votes
7
answers
166k
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cut column 2 from text file
My text file has no delimiter to specify separator just spaces, how do I cut out column 2 to output file,
39 207 City and County of San Francisc REJECTED MAT = 0
78 412 Cases and ...
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30
votes
2
answers
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Getting first n characters from a file [duplicate]
I want to get the first 20 or so characters from a number of files.
I've seen examples using cut but they all seem to get the first 20 characters of each line in the file, while I only want the ...
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29
votes
3
answers
143k
views
cut string on last delimiter
I have a filename like a.b.c.txt, I want this string to be split as
string1=a.b.c
string2=txt
Basically I want to split filename and its extension. I used cut but it splits as a,b,c and txt. I want ...
27
votes
8
answers
4k
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Is piping, shifting, or parameter expansion more efficient?
I'm trying to find the most efficient way to iterate through certain values that are a consistent number of values away from each other in a space separated list of words(I don't want to use an array)....
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6
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Can I make `cut` change a file in place?
The man page doesn't give me much hope, but I'm hoping it's an undocumented (and/or GNU-specific) feature.
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Can not use `cut -c` (`--characters`) with UTF-8?
The command cut has an option -c to work on characters, instead of bytes with the option -b. But that does not seem to work, in en_US.UTF-8 locale:
The second byte gives the second ASCII character (...
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19
votes
4
answers
3k
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What should I use when cut doesn't cut it?
I have a file cities like this:
[1598] San Diego, US (inactive)
[4517] St Louis, US (inactive)
[6346] Orlando, US (inactive)
I want to cut out the city names, so that I have:
San Diego
St Louis
...
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18
votes
2
answers
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coreutils that are utf aware?
When I used cut today, I found out it doesn't treat a UTF-8 character as a character, but 3 characters because it's 3 bytes long.
This seems to be generally true for many tools.
Are there versions ...
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votes
6
answers
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What constitutes a 'field' for the cut command?
For example, the cut command can take a parameter -f, which according to man
select only these fields; also print any line that contains no
delimiter character, unless the -s ...
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15
votes
7
answers
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Combining 2 different cut outputs in a single command?
I have a file such as the following:
1234
ABCD
EFGH
I'd like to convert it to the following:
2341
BCDA
FGHE
The actual file has 4,000 words, so I would like to do this in an efficient manner. I ...
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13
votes
1
answer
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How to unbuffer cut?
I want to get just e-mail addresses that end in "@xyz.nl" from my mail logfile. To achieve this I do:
# tail -f /var/log/mail.log | grep --i --line-buffered "@xyz.nl" | cut -d '@' -f 1 | cut -d '<'...
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votes
3
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Dynamically trim stdout line width in Bash
Lately, I have been experimenting with the ps command, and sometimes long paths wrap to the next line (or two) and make it hard to read. I want to pipe the ps output into another program to limit the ...
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votes
4
answers
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Emacs command to cut OR copy to system clipboard?
As a very new Emacs user, I've been using Ctrl+w and Ctrl+y to cut/copy and paste between buffers in Emacs. Is there a way to do the same thing so that not just Emacs, but the entire system, can have ...
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11
votes
3
answers
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Get the part of a line before the last slash
I'm trying to write a conky script that shows my MPD album art, a 'folder.jpg' in the album folder. My current plan is to use mpc -f %file%, which prints out the file name and path, and then cut out ...
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10
votes
4
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How to create numeronyms in bash
I am trying to write a code that would turn any given word to its numeronym.
for example : internationalization = i18n (first char+number of chars in between+last char)
I found how to find the first ...
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7
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grep first n and last n characters from a line in a file
I have a log file which looks like:
Mar 23 08:20:23 New file got created in sec: 235
Mar 23 08:21:45 New file got created in sec: 127
Mar 23 08:22:34 New file got created in sec: 875
Mar 23 08:25:46 ...
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5
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How do I remove the last characters from a string?
I have a variable set with var='type_cardio_10-11-2017'. I need to remove the last 10 letters from the variable, and append the remaining value to var2.
I tried with the following script, but it ...
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3
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cut command seems not to work in a pipe
I am able to filter out jobs which got stuck in our queueing system with:
> qjobs | grep "racon"
5240703 racon-3/utg001564l-racon-3.fasta H 1 1 0 10.0 0.0 150 :03
...
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6
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Grab certain contents of a file
So I know tools exist for this problem because I've heard about them, but I don't know what they are.
I want to do something like filter out all data but the usernames in /etc/passwd.
For example, I ...
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2
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Pipe the result of a cut command to curl
I have a csv file that contains 3 fields per line.
firstname,lastname,url
I'm trying to access the url via the following pipeline:
grep theName file.csv | cut -d, -f 3
then I want to add another ...
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7
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How can I apply `cut` to several files and then `paste` the results?
I often do operations like
paste <(cut -d, -f1 file1.csv) <(cut -d, -f1 file2.csv)
which is very tedious with more than a few files.
Can I automate this process, e.g. with globbing? I can ...
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4
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What does cut return if the specified field does not exist?
I have a string:
6.40.4
and a second one:
6.40
I am using var=$(echo $versionfull | cut -d'.' -f3) to get the third digit from the first string in bash. What does this command return for the ...
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votes
2
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"No such file or directory" when using "-exec" with find
I have a bunch of folders which have a subfolder somewhere called 360.
find . -name '360' -type d -exec 'echo "{}"' \;
output:
find: echo "./workspace/6875538616c6/raw/2850cd9cf25b/360": No such ...
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votes
5
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cut with 2 character delimiter
I wanted to use cut to with a 2 charachter delimeter to process a file with many lines like this:
1F3C6..1F3CA
1F3CF..1F3D3
1F3E0..1F3F0
But cut only allows a single character.
Instead of cut -d'..'...
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3
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Using tab delimiter in Cut in Unix Shell Scripting [duplicate]
I have file input.txt with below data in TAB delimited format-
23776112 Inactive Active
23415312 Inactive Active
As per requirement, Inside the while loop, I want to use ...
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What the equivalent of "grep | cut" using sed or awk?
Say I had a config file /etc/emails.conf
email1 = [email protected]
email2 = [email protected]
email3 = [email protected]
and I wanted to get email2
I could do a:
grep email2 /etc/emails.conf | ...
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Does the inverse command of cut exist?
I like using the cut command in Linux with the -c flag. However, I'm interested in finding a command that sort of does the set inverse of cut. Essentially, given the input:
drwxrwxrwx 2 root root ...
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3
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Is there a parameter substitution/expansion alternative for "| cut -f1,2,3 -d:" a.k.a. trim after and including n-th character occurence?
An ancient version of ipconfig (inside initramfs) requires its user input to supply only up to 7 colon separated elements, like:
ip=client-ip:server-ip:gw-ip:netmask:hostname:device:autoconf
result ...
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votes
4
answers
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"Cutting" id output
I need to write a script that would "cut" the output of the id command into three parts. For example:
Let's say id gives this output: uid=12345(mylogin) gid=100(users)
And my script should output ...
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votes
8
answers
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How to delete the first word in each line of a file?
consider a file names 'file.txt'.
It contains the following.
dove is a bird
tiger is an animal
cricket is a game.
Expected output:
is a bird
is an animal
is a game.
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UNIX command for replacing within delimiter based on position of the delimiter
I have a input string with | [pipe] delimiter and like to replace the empty string 3rd and 5th column by & character.
Input File:
a a|b b|c c|d d|e e
f f|g g|h h|i i|j j
Output File:
a a|b b|c&...
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How to use Unix Shell to show only the first n columns and last n columns?
I have many csv files. The original design was supposed to have five columns.
I just found out that the middle column of the csv file has a string with arbitrary number of commas in it and it is not ...
6
votes
4
answers
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cut / grep and df -h
How can I grep or cut the "173G" under "Verf"?
I need this for Unix scripting in school.
jonas@jonaspc:~/$ df -h /dev/sda2
Dateisystem Größe Benutzt Verf. Verw% Eingehängt auf
/dev/sda2 ...
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2
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Get only the size of a mounted filesystem
I want to get only the total size of a mounted filesystem. But the catch is that I only know about the mount point. So, I thought of using the df command.
To get the size of this mounted filesystem, ...
6
votes
2
answers
7k
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Unix: how to read line's original content from file
I have a data file, the content is as follows:
department: customer service section: A
department: marketing section: A
department: finance section: A
When I read each line, I ...
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1
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How can I remove certain string from file name? [duplicate]
I have few files in the following directory: /var/lib/jenkins/bin/
-rwxr-xr-x. 1 root root 4430846 Apr 27 09:45 01-DSP-04.12_03_crc.bin
-rwxr-xr-x. 1 root root 1659036 Apr 27 09:45 01-FL4-04.12_02-...
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1
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Does cut return any fields if separator does not exist
I executed
cut -d '~' -f 2 on input
RSC
AED
FCB
A~RS
and I obtained
RSC
AED
FCB
RS
I realized that cut will return entire line if the delimiter does not exist.
It is that true?
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Range of the command cut in unix
I'm trying to make a shell script, I want to cut a string using the 'cut' unix command, as follows:
namecmpaux=$(echo $namecmp |cut -c0-19)
But when I run the shell tells me the following error:
...
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7
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Parse a string using keywords
I am using a bash command, gps location, that returns a date, time and location information.
[john@hostname :~/develp] $ gps location
Location: {"date": "16/07/20", "time"...
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