UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I have a file containung a list. each object in the list has 3 parts, which i will refer as x y z
I need to replace the x y z with the x alone and send it to a different file.
The x size is one caracter but it's value is changing. the y contained the x charecter, so I cant use the simple "sed" values. I found in the "man sed" an argumant that can be set "n=1-2048" but it doesn't seem to work. any ideas?

Well... depending on the "structure" of the
data items in the file, you could simply
use a shell script and "read" each line into
3 distinct variables and simply "echo" the single
variable to a new file. Again, I'm also not
exactly sure if you also wanted to strip the
first variable from the source file but you
could do somthing like...

#!/bin/sh

while read first second third
do
echo $first >> ./new_file_1var
echo $second $third >> ./new_file_2vars
done < ./source_file_3vars

exit 0

Again, this assumes the data in the source file
contains no spaces in the data items themselves
only whitespace separating data items.