UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Dear all,

I want to extract around 300 columns from a very large file with almost 2million columns. There are no headers, but I can find out which column numbers I want. I know I can extract with the function 'cut -f2' for example just the second column but how do I do this for such a large number of columns which are spread around the whole document?

Thank you in advance for your help.

Best regards,
Nicole

If you have the list of columns to be extracted, just give them to cut in a comma-separated list. If there are several adjacent fields, specify them as a range in the list. For example:

Code:

cut -f2,5,10-20,1000025 file

will extract fields 2, 5, 10 through 20, and 1,000,025 from the file named file.