Sponsored Content
Top Forums UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users How can I use double character delimiter in the cut command Post 302139488 by drl on Sunday 7th of October 2007 03:36:48 PM
Old 10-07-2007
Hi.

Standard cut accepts a single character for a delimiter. The awk interpreter allows a regular expression to be specified. So, for example, you could approximate the cut of field 2 of your sample data with:
Code:
#!/usr/bin/env sh

# @(#) a1       Demonstrate awk field splitting with a regular expression.

set -o nounset
echo

## Use local command version for the commands in this demonstration.

echo "(Versions used in this script displayed with local utility "version")"
version bash awk cat

echo
echo " Results of printing field 2, as cut might do it:"

awk '
BEGIN   { FS = " *[|][|] *" }
        { print $2 }
' data1 |
cat -vet

exit 0

Producing:
Code:
% ./a1

(Versions used in this script displayed with local utility version)
GNU bash, version 2.05b.0(1)-release (i386-pc-linux-gnu)
GNU Awk 3.1.4
cat (coreutils) 5.2.1

 Results of printing field 2, as cut might do it:
mango$

You could remove the " *" from the regular expression, but then you would get extra spaces around the output fields ... cheers, drl
 

10 More Discussions You Might Find Interesting

1. Shell Programming and Scripting

Dynamic delimiter in cut command

hello.. my prob is as follows: i have to read from a file which may have different formats depending upon the delimiter used in the data of the file.now i need that the user input the delimiter.the input delimiter is stored in a variable and is used on cut command to retrieve necessary... (3 Replies)
Discussion started by: tej.buch
3 Replies

2. Shell Programming and Scripting

\r as delimiter in cut

I need to use \r as a delimiter in the -d option of the cut comand . Any help ? Thanks in advance . SD (5 Replies)
Discussion started by: shweta_d
5 Replies

3. UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Removing Double Spaces for cut command

Hi I have a shell script that looks for running processes in order to kill them. The script (ksh) gets the PID of these processes using the following: PROCS=`ps -fu ${USERID} | egrep "MONITOR" | grep -v grep | cut -d" " -f4` However, I spotted an issue where PID's of different lengths... (3 Replies)
Discussion started by: mikem22
3 Replies

4. Shell Programming and Scripting

CUT command delimiter in reverse

Hi, I've a situation where, a=xxx.yyy.zzz.txt EXTN=`echo $a | cut -d . -f2` Using the above code it delimites and will return "yyy.zzz.txt" to EXTN. But i need to get only the extension "txt". so as per the above code it delimits in the first "." itself. Can anyone help how to do... (6 Replies)
Discussion started by: skcvasanth
6 Replies

5. UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

set output delimiter as tab in cut command

I can not make it work, it prints \t rather than introduce tabs. cut -d "," -f 4,8 Samples.csv --output-delimiter="\t" | sort > out Since I am running this command within a shell script, I tried manually inserting tab in this command, still does not work. I am using bash shell Suggestions... (8 Replies)
Discussion started by: analyst
8 Replies

6. Shell Programming and Scripting

How to cut by delimiter, and delimiter can be anything except numbers?

Hi all, I have a number of strings like below: //mnt/autocor/43°13'(33")W/ and i'm trying to get the numbers in this string, for example 431333 please help thanks ahead (14 Replies)
Discussion started by: sunnydanniel
14 Replies

7. UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Cut command doesn't remove (^C) character from only first line

I have a file which has first 2 junk characters(X^C) at beginning of each line in file. When i run cut -c 2- filename it removes junk characters from all lines except on first line it keeps one junk character control C(^C). Not sure why it is not removing only from first line. (2 Replies)
Discussion started by: later_troy
2 Replies

8. Shell Programming and Scripting

sed searches a character string for a specified delimiter character, and returns a leading or traili

Hi, Anyone can help using SED searches a character string for a specified delimiter character, and returns a leading or trailing space/blank. Text file : "1"|"ExternalClassDEA519CF5"|"Art1" "2"|"ExternalClass563EA516C"|"Art3" "3"|"ExternalClass305ED16B8"|"Art9" ... ... ... (2 Replies)
Discussion started by: fspalero
2 Replies

9. Shell Programming and Scripting

Problem in using cut command with pipe as a delimiter while using in a script

There is a text file in my project named as "mom.txt" in which i want to have contents like.................. LSCRM(Application Name): 1: This is my first application. 2: Today we did shell scripting automation for this app. 3: It was really a good fun in doing so. 4: Really good.| (Here i... (7 Replies)
Discussion started by: Abhijeet Anand
7 Replies

10. Shell Programming and Scripting

Cut command with dynamic passing of delimiter and position values

Hi All, We have a requirement of picking nth position value by using cut command. value would be delimited by any symbols. We have to pass delimited value and postition to get the value in a string. ex. echo "A,B,C,D,E" |cut -d "," -f3 echo "A|B|C|D|E"|cut -d "|" -f2 Kindly frame the... (5 Replies)
Discussion started by: KK230689
5 Replies
CUT(1)							      General Commands Manual							    CUT(1)

NAME
cut - select out columns of a file SYNOPSIS
cut [ -b | -c] list [file...] cut -f list [-d delim] [ -s] OPTIONS
-b Cut specified bytes -c Select out specific characters -d Change the column delimiter to delim -f Select out specific fields that are separated by the -i Runs of delimiters count as one -s Suppres lines with no delimiter characters, when used EXAMPLES
cut -f 2 file # Extract field 2 cut -c 1-2,5 file # Extract character columns 1, 2, and 5 cut -c 1-5,7- file # Extract all columns except 6 DESCRIPTION
[file...]" delimiter character ( see delim)" with the -f option. Lines with no delimiters are passwd through untouched" Cut extracts one or more fields or columns from a file and writes them on standard output. If the -f flag is used, the fields are sepa- rated by a delimiter character, normally a tab, but can be changed using the -d flag. If the -c flag is used, specific columns can be specified. The list can be comma or BLANK separated. The -f and -c flags are mutually exclusive. Note: The POSIX1003.2 standard requires the option -b to cut out specific bytes in a file. It is intended for systems with multi byte characters (e.g. kanji), since MINIX uses only one byte characters, this option is equivalent to -c. For the same reason, the option -n has no effect and is not listed in this man- ual page. SEE ALSO
sed(1), awk(9). CUT(1)
All times are GMT -4. The time now is 06:19 AM.
Unix & Linux Forums Content Copyright 1993-2022. All Rights Reserved.
Privacy Policy