Linda Walsh wrote:
> Don't know if this is the appropriate place for this, but if it
> isn't possible, I could "suggest" that it might be considered a
> bug or at least a "design deficiency". :-)
> ...
> What I don't know how to do is how to select a "whitespace"
> delimited field. It's one of the more common field delimiters I
> run into. The easiest, but rather inefficient methods is to
> pipe the input into a shell-based "while read field1, field2..."
> loop, but it sure would make sense if there was an option
> to "cut" to handle white-space delimited fields.
But why try to use cut for that task when there are other better
suited tools? I think the main reason cut has not needed to be
enhanced for all of these years is that awk does a better job of it.
Therefore there is no itch to scratch. Just use a more appropriate
tool.
> Is there an option to "cut" that I don't know about, or am I
> looking in the wrong place for this type of functionality,
> or is this a feature "deficit", in "cut", that needs remedying?
Yes. The best way to use 'cut' to split on whitespace is to spell it
'awk'. ;-)
echo one two three | awk '{print$2}'
And of course less standard options such as perl, python and ruby all
exist as well.
Bob
_______________________________________________
Bug-coreutils mailing list
Bug-coreutils@gnu.org
http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
