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# 1  
Old 10-16-2009
Cut command
Code:
$ cut -d\| -f 2,3 shortlist | tee cutlist1

what's the use of \ in this command??
Last edited by radoulov; 10-16-2009 at 07:55 AM.. Reason: please use code tags
# 2  
Old 10-16-2009
I daresay this means that the pipe following ought to be used not as pipe but as delimiter, or, how I would code it:

Code:
cut -d '|' -f 2,3 shortlist | tee cutlist1

# 3  
Old 10-23-2009
The full explaination is that the \ acts as an escape, which turns off shell translation of the next character, so, in your example, | isn't handled by the shell as the pipe, but as a character. Putting single quotes around it is a bit more straightforward and lends more to readability by humans, as the previous poster, "DR House" recommended.
# 4  
Old 02-24-2010
The option -d in cut command is used to specify the delimiter.
Here the delimiter is pipe character.But the character pipe has special meaning so we need to escape this character.
For escape the character we can use the following ways.
cut -d "|" -f 2,3 file1

cut -d '|' -f 2,3 file1

cut -d \| -f 2,3 file1

So \ is used for escaping pipe character .
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