The Linux Newbie Guide

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The cut command in Linux is used to extract sections from lines of files or from piped input. It is commonly used for extracting columns or fields from text files or output streams, based on a specified delimiter character. The basic syntax of the cut command is:
cut [OPTIONS] [FILE]

Here, "OPTIONS" are optional flags that modify the behavior of the cut command, and "FILE" is the name of the text file you want to process. If you don't specify a file, cut will read from standard input (usually piped input).

Some common options for the cut command include:

-d: This option specifies the delimiter character used in the input file to separate columns. You can specify any character you want as the delimiter.
-f: This option specifies the fields (columns) to be extracted from the input. You can specify a single field number or a range of fields separated by a comma.
--complement: This option inverts the selection, so it prints the fields that are not specified using the "-f" option.
-s or --only-delimited: This option suppresses lines that do not contain the delimiter character specified by the" -d" option.

Here are a couple of examples of using the cut command:

$ seq -s "`echo -e "\t"`" 0 5 ←Outputs 1~5 using \t (tab) as the delimiter.
0 1 2 3 4 5
$ seq -s "`echo -e "\t"`" 0 5 | cut -f 2,5 ←The previous output combined with the "cut" command to retain only columns 2 and 5
1 4

The cut command is useful for data manipulation and processing, especially when working with structured text data like CSV files or log files where you want to extract specific columns of information.

For more cut examples, explanations, and option references, please refer to the provided link.