Is it possible to use a string as a delimiter in unix cut command?

unix cut utilities
Devang Kamdar picture Devang Kamdar · May 13, 2009 · Viewed 52.8k times · Source

If I want to cut a list of text using a string as a delimiter, is that possible? For example I have a directory where a list of shell scripts call same perl script say 

abc.pl

So when I do 

$grep abc.pl *

in that directory, it gives me following results

xyz.sh: abc.pl 1 2
xyz2.sh: abc.pl 2
mno.sh: abc.pl 3
pqr.sh: abc.pl 4 5

I basically want all the output after "abc.pl" (to check what range arguments are being passed to the perl right now)

When I tried 

$grep abc.pl * | cut -d'abc.pl' -f2

OR

$grep abc.pl * | cut -d'abc\.pl' -f2

its giving me 

cut: invalid delimiter

When I read man for cut it states

delim can be a multi-byte character.

What am I doing/interpreting wrong here?

Answer

vkrishna picture vkrishna · May 17, 2017

Try using this. 

$grep abc.pl * | awk -F 'abc.pl' '{print $2}'

-F fs --field-separator fs Use fs for the input field separator (the value of the FS predefined variable).

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