cut(1)

💖 NAME 💖

okay so bestie, welcome to cut — the manual page, general commands manual energy, and this one Prints specified byte or field columns from each line of stdin or the input files. that's the whole vibe. it slices, it dices, it gives you exactly the columns you asked for. no cap. 💅

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

cut [-b|--bytes] [-c|--characters] [-d|--delimiter] [-w ] [-f|--fields]
[--complement] [-s|--only-delimited] [-z|--zero-terminated]
[--output-delimiter] [-n ] [-h|--help] [-V|--version] [file]

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

literally what it says on the tin, queen: it Prints specified byte or field columns from each line of stdin or the input files. every single line gets the column treatment. periodt. 🌸

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🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

• -b, --bytes LIST — filter byte columns from the input source
• -c, --characters LIST — alias for character mode
• -d, --delimiter DELIM — specify the delimiter character that separates fields in the input source. Defaults to Tab.
• -w — Use any number of whitespace (Space, Tab) to separate fields in the input source (FreeBSD extension).
• -f, --fields LIST — filter field columns from the input source
• --complement — invert the filter — instead of displaying only the filtered columns, display all but those columns
• -s, --only-delimited — in field mode, only print lines which contain the delimiter
• -z, --zero-terminated — instead of filtering columns based on line, filter columns based on \\0 (NULL character)
• --output-delimiter NEW_DELIM — in field mode, replace the delimiter in output lines with this option's argument
• -n — (ignored) 🙈 yes bestie it's just there, vibing, doing absolutely nothing
• -h, --help — Print help
• -V, --version — Print version

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🌈 EXTRA 🌈

Each call must specify a mode (what to use for columns), a sequence (which columns to print), and provide a data source. three things, every time. that's the whole recipe, iykyk. 🫶

🧚 Specifying a mode

Use --bytes (-b) or --characters (-c) to specify byte mode.

Use --fields (-f) to specify field mode, where each line is broken into fields identified by a delimiter character. For example for a typical CSV you could use this in combination with setting comma as the delimiter. csv girlies rise 👑

🍓 Specifying a sequence

A sequence is a group of 1 or more numbers or inclusive ranges separated by a commas.

cut -f 2,5-7 some_file.txt

will display the 2nd, 5th, 6th, and 7th field for each source line.

Ranges can extend to the end of the row by excluding the second number.

cut -f 3- some_file.txt

will display the 3rd field and all fields after for each source line.

The first number of a range can be excluded, and this is effectively the same as using 1 as the first number: it causes the range to begin at the first column. Ranges can also display a single column.

cut -f 1,3-5 some_file.txt

will display the 1st, 3rd, 4th, and 5th field for each source line.

The --complement option, when used, inverts the effect of the sequence.

cut --complement -f 4-6 some_file.txt

will display the every field but the 4th, 5th, and 6th. not me deleting columns from the timeline 💀

💜 Specifying a data source

If no sourcefile arguments are specified, stdin is used as the source of lines to print.

If sourcefile arguments are specified, stdin is ignored and all files are read in consecutively if a sourcefile is not successfully read, a warning will print to stderr, and the eventual status code will be 1, but cut will continue to read through proceeding sourcefiles. she does NOT give up on the rest of your files, that's main character energy fr fr.

To print columns from both STDIN and a file argument, use - (dash) as a sourcefile argument to represent stdin.

🌸 Field Mode options

The fields in each line are identified by a delimiter (separator).

⭐ Set the delimiter

Set the delimiter which separates fields in the file using the --delimiter (-d) option. Setting the delimiter is optional. If not set, a default delimiter of Tab will be used.

If the -w option is provided, fields will be separated by any number of whitespace characters (Space and Tab). The output delimiter will be a Tab unless explicitly specified. Only one of -d or -w option can be specified. This is an extension adopted from FreeBSD.

⭐ Optionally Filter based on delimiter

If the --only-delimited (-s) flag is provided, only lines which contain the delimiter will be printed.

⭐ Replace the delimiter

If the --output-delimiter option is provided, the argument used for it will replace the delimiter character in each line printed. This is useful for transforming tabular data — e.g. to convert a CSV to a TSV (tab-separated file). glow up your data bestie ✨

🌟 Line endings

When the --zero-terminated (-z) option is used, cut sees \\0 (null) as the 'line ending' character (both for the purposes of reading lines and separating printed lines) instead of \\n (newline). This is useful for tabular data where some of the cells may contain newlines.

echo 'ab\\0cd' | cut -z -c 1

will result in 'a\\0c\\0'.

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👑 VERSION 👑

v(uutils coreutils) 0.7.0

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and that's the whole page, bestie 🫶 this was cut (uutils coreutils) 0.7.0, iconic, slay, go forth and slice your columns. bye 💖✨🎀🦋