CHOOSE(1)

📦 version 1.3.7, in ubuntu stonking

✨ CHOOSE(1) ✨

okay so bestie, welcome to the User Commands section of the manual, and this one is literally the it-girl of the terminal: choose. no cap. sit down, grab a strawberry 🍓, and let me tell you everything.

🌸 NAME 🌸

choose — the human-friendly and fast alternative to cut and awk 💅 (yes, really, both of them. iconic behaviour.)

🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

choose [FLAGS] [OPTIONS] <choices>...

that's the whole vibe right there. flags, options, and then a pile of choices. periodt. ✨

💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

okay so choose is a terse field selection tool, and "terse" is doing a LOT of work in that sentence — it works like Python's list slices, which honestly? a serve. 🎀

it is not meant to be a drop-in replacement for awk or cut, bestie, don't come for me — it's just a simple and intuitive little tool you reach for when the basics of awk or cut will do, but the overhead of getting them to behave should not be necessary. 😌 like, you could fight with awk for twenty minutes, or you could just... not.

it features:

  • a simple syntax 🌈
  • negative indexing from the end of the line 🦋
  • zero-indexing (yes babe, we start at 0, that's the law) 👑
  • reverse ranges 🔥
  • regular expression field separators using Rust's regex syntax ✨

it's giving "small tool, huge personality," fr fr.

💅 OPTIONS 💅

  • -c, --character-wise — choose fields by character number 🧚
  • -d, --debug — activate debug mode 🔍 (for when you need to see what's actually happening, iykyk)
  • -x, --exclusive — use exclusive ranges, similar to array indexing in many programming languages 👀
  • -n, --non-greedy — use non-greedy field separators ✂️
  • -f, --field-separator <field-separator> — specify a field separator other than whitespace, using Rust regex syntax 🎀
  • -i, --input <input> — read from the <input> file instead of standard input 📂
  • -o, --output-field-separator <output-field-separator> — specify output field separator 🫶
  • -h, --help — prints help information 🆘
  • -V, --version — prints version information 🌟

⭐ ARGUMENTS ⭐

  • <choices>... — fields to print. either a, a:b, a..b, or a..=b, where a and b are integers 💜

the beginning or end of a range can be omitted, which results in including the beginning or end of the line, respectively 🌸 (so like, no left number = start from the very top of the line, no right number = ride it all the way to the end)

and now the part everyone gets wrong, so listen up:

  • a:b is inclusive of b — unless overridden by -x 🚨
  • a..b is exclusive of b 🙈
  • a..=b is inclusive of b ✨

🔥 EXAMPLES 🔥

the moment you've all been waiting for. 🎀

  • choose 5 print the 5th item from a line (zero indexed). 👑
  • choose -f ':' 0 3 5 print the 0th, 3rd, and 5th item from a line, where items are separated by ':' instead of whitespace. 🍓
  • choose 2:5 print everything from the 2nd to 5th item on the line, inclusive of the 5th. 💖
  • choose -x 2:5 print everything from the 2nd to 5th item on the line, exclusive of the 5th. ✂️
  • choose :3 print the beginning of the line to the 3rd item. 🌈
  • choose -x :3 print the beginning of the line to the 3rd item, exclusive. 🙈
  • choose 3: print the third item to the end of the line. 🦋
  • choose -1 print the last item from a line. 💅
  • choose -3:-1 print the last three items from a line. 👑💜

🌈 AUTHOR 🌈

Ryan Geary <rtgnj42@gmail.com> — the icon who made this 🫶

this manual page was written by Ching He <heqing@rool.me> for the Debian project (and may be used by others). 💖 giving credit where credit is due, as one does.

bestie reminder: this page is choose, from User Commands, and the version/date tag on the bottom of the original is 2026-06-11. so when you cite it, cite it cute. 💅✨

xoxo, go slice some fields, you absolute main character 🌸🦋💜

📦 where this page comes from