How to make the 'cut' command treat same sequental delimiters as one?

bash unix delimiter cut
mbaitoff picture mbaitoff · Nov 10, 2010 · Viewed 152.2k times · Source

I'm trying to extract a certain (the fourth) field from the column-based, 'space'-adjusted text stream. I'm trying to use the cut command in the following manner:

cat text.txt | cut -d " " -f 4

Unfortunately, cut doesn't treat several spaces as one delimiter. I could have piped through awk

awk '{ printf $4; }'

or sed

sed -E "s/[[:space:]]+/ /g"

to collapse the spaces, but I'd like to know if there any way to deal with cut and several delimiters natively?

Answer

kev picture kev · Dec 19, 2010

Try:

tr -s ' ' <text.txt | cut -d ' ' -f4

From the tr man page:

-s, --squeeze-repeats   replace each input sequence of a repeated character
                        that is listed in SET1 with a single occurrence
                        of that character

Related questions

How can I check if a directory exists in a Bash shell script?

What command can be used to check if a directory exists or not, within a Bash shell script?

Read More
Looping through the content of a file in Bash

How do I iterate through each line of a text file with Bash? With this script: echo "Start!" for p in (peptides.txt) do echo "${p}" done I get this output on the screen: Start! ./runPep.sh: line 3: syntax error …

Read More
How to permanently set $PATH on Linux/Unix?

I'm trying to add a directory to my path so it will always be in my Linux path. I've tried: export PATH=$PATH:/path/to/dir This works, however each time I exit the terminal and start a new terminal …

Read More