UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

I got your point before, and was agreeing. But I don't get your point this time.

I never suggested or thought cut only works with printing characters.

I don't agree that tab and backspace "seldom take up one column". The discussion is about fields and columns in files. I think tab and BS always take up one column (single byte characters). If you are referring to how the file displays on a monitor or printer, I think that's just an artifact. I don't think it's relevant to the issue that tab might be displayed ^I or eight spaces, or 'A' displayed in binary or hex by od, etc.

The POSIX and UNIX Standards have definitions for the terms byte, character, and column position that are very different from what you described above. The standard definitions are:So your description of a column being equivalent to a byte just doesn't compute with what I believe that term means.

To correct the record, I didn't say "a column is equivalent to a byte". And that's quite an assertion you so boldly made, that the standard definitions of byte and character are "very different" from how I used those terms. I've been using gettext, i8n, Unicode and UTF-8 for many years, and understand bytes and multi-byte chars very well. For the record, so I'm not deemed some kind of radical, I 100% agree with the standard definitions of byte and character you included.

My original post was about the word "column", in the context of a delimited file. We've gotten far off that topic. I previously agreed with you that I failed to think about locales when discussing why the cut option says "--characters" and not "--columns". I was trying to be nice. Could we move on?

I apologize. I misinterpreted your statement:
to mean that you were equating bytes to columns.

Sometimes e-mail/forum discussions lead to confusion that would never occur in a face-to-face discussion where a clarification would happen immediately rather than being exacerbated by the delays between posts in a forum like this.