UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I want to pull out the 3rd column of information and stick in a file. What is the Utility I use to do this?

hi folks.

there are different ways to display a column. we take a file "text.txt" with the following content for testing:

Alex the bad guy.
Mike the good guy.
Susi is not a guy.

the best way to display the 3th column (bad, good, not) is:

cat text.txt | awk '{print $3}'

you can use "cut", too. (see man cut).

b.r.
alex

'cut' or 'awk'

hi.
it`s me again.

here is the syntax fur "cut"

1) cat /etc/passwd | cut -d : -f 3

or

2) cut -d : -f 3 /etc/passwd

-d is the "delimiter"
-f is the field to display.

best regards,
alex....

Thank you so much!!!

I've tried making this work. I'm trying to get the every 3rd line of a txt file to copy to another file.

Example:

See jill run
jill runs up hill
see jill fall
see jack run
jack runs up hill
see jack fall

I'm needing "see jill fall" and "see jack fall" copied to another fill called output.txt

Then I need to make this work on several servers and loop with a timer on it to run at 1am. I know I can the timer with CRON after I get the file to work properly. However, I don't know how to make it loop and run on several different servers from one server running the script.

Any help I would appreciate it!

Thank you again for all the help you have given me.
James

Couldn't I use PICO for editing and extracting the info?