Red Hat Knowledgebase

Delimited files are text files that use some sort of special characters, usually a TAB or comma, to separate fields of a record. If you need to extract some fields but not others try using the cut command.

Using cut, you can extract one or many contiguous or non-contiguous fields from a delimited file. For example, to extract just the username and the shell from the /etc/passwd file (the first and seventh fields), use the following command:

cut -d ':' -f 1,7 /etc/passwd

The following output is displayed:

root:/bin/bash bin:/sbin/nologin daemon:/sbin/nologin adm:/sbin/nologin lp:/sbin/nologin sync:/bin/sync shutdown:/sbin/shutdown halt:/sbin/halt mail:/sbin/nologin news: uucp:/sbin/nologin operator:/sbin/nologin games:/sbin/nologin gopher:/sbin/nologin ftp:/sbin/nologin nobody:/sbin/nologin dbus:/sbin/nologin vcsa:/sbin/nologin nscd:/sbin/nologin rpm:/sbin/nologin haldaemon:/sbin/nologin netdump:/bin/bash sshd:/sbin/nologin rpc:/sbin/nologin rpcuser:/sbin/nologin nfsnobody:/sbin/nologin mailnull:/sbin/nologin smmsp:/sbin/nologin pcap:/sbin/nologin ....

For more information on the cut command, consult the man page for cut by typing man cut from the command line.