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Full Discussion: Cut command: can't make it cut fields
Top Forums UNIX for Beginners Questions & Answers Cut command: can't make it cut fields Post 302971706 by Don Cragun on Sunday 24th of April 2016 06:33:18 PM
Old 04-24-2016
If the idea is just to use tr to translate ls -l output spaces and tabs separating fields into single tab characters, you can try:
Code:
ls -l|tr -s '[:blank:]' '\t'|cut -f 1,3,4,9

which should do what you want as long as none of your filenames contain whitespace characters (i.e., spaces, tabs, or newlines). But, stat might be more reliable and just needs one command instead of a three stage pipeline:
Code:
stat -f '%Sp%t%Su%t%Sg%t%N' *

which should do what you want unless you have a lot of files in your directory with enough long filenames to overflow ARG_MAX limits.

And, if you could have large numbers of files some of which have names that contain space or tab characters (but not newlines) you could always feed the ls output through sed:
Code:
ls -l|sed 's/\([^[:blank:]]*\)[[:blank:]]*[0-9]*[[:blank:]]*\([^[:blank:]]*\)[[:blank:]]*\([^[:blank:]]*\)\([[:blank:]]*[^[:blank:]]*\)\{4\} /\1        \2      \3      /'

where those are literal tab characters after the \1, \2, and \3 in the replacement text of the substitute command to get exactly what you want no matter how many files are present in the directory.

Note that in all of these I used the blank character class instead of just using a space character in these patterns and BREs because I'm not sure whether ls ever uses tab characters to reduce the number of characters it writes while lining up output fields.
 

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LEARN ABOUT REDHAT

iswblank

ISWBLANK(3)						     Linux Programmer's Manual						       ISWBLANK(3)

NAME

       iswblank - test for whitespace wide character

SYNOPSIS

       #include <wctype.h>

       int iswblank(wint_t wc);

DESCRIPTION

       The  iswblank  function	is the wide-character equivalent of the isblank function. It tests whether wc is a wide character belonging to the
       wide character class "blank".

       The wide character class "blank" is a subclass of the wide character class "space".

       Being a subclass of the wide character class "space", the wide character class "blank" is disjoint from the wide  character  class  "graph"
       and therefore also disjoint from its subclasses "alnum", "alpha", "upper", "lower", "digit", "xdigit", "punct".

       The wide character class "blank" always contains at least the space character and the control character '	'.

RETURN VALUE

       The iswblank function returns non-zero if wc is a wide character belonging to the wide character class "blank". Otherwise it returns zero.

CONFORMING TO

       This function is a GNU extension.

SEE ALSO

       isblank(3), iswctype(3)

NOTES

       The behaviour of iswblank depends on the LC_CTYPE category of the current locale.

GNU
								    1999-07-25							       ISWBLANK(3)
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