Well, not really. But I assume I’ll get lots of attention with that name alone. When I thought about writing this it was for one very specific thing only.
Often times in a script I’ll want to strip output based on a delimiter or columns. I found myself constantly fighting with IFS and trying to make sense of delimiters that don’t follow a common pattern. My two ways of extracting columns from a file/variable are as follows:
echo $variable | cut -f 2 -d “:” –> (-f to select column, -d to select delimiter)
echo $variable | awk ‘{ print $2 }’
Believe it or not, for someone that started off with no formal shell training or anything, this took me awhile to figure out. Cut has its ups and downs but I will say this, awk is without a doubt worth learning. In its entirety.
Anyways, this was just a quick update on how to extract columns from data using cut and awk
