Hello. I often try to use `cut` to get specific columns from `ls -l` but since `ls` uses spaces as padding for aligning fields, I am not able to do something like this to get the sizes alone (just for illustration):
$ ls -l total 1632 -rwxrwxr-x 1 samjnaa samjnaa 548912 Oct 18 08:20 add-commas -rw-rw-r-- 1 samjnaa samjnaa 752 Oct 17 15:32 add-commas.d -rw-rw-r-- 1 samjnaa samjnaa 1109848 Oct 18 08:20 add-commas.o -rw-rw-r-- 1 samjnaa samjnaa 413 Oct 18 08:19 compile $ ls -l | cut -d ' ' -f5 1109848 $ I request that an option may be added to collapse multiple consecutive instances of the same delimiter to avoid empty fields in the output in use cases such as above. Thanks! -- Shriramana Sharma ஶ்ரீரமணஶர்மா श्रीरमणशर्मा
