bash – How to Define ‘Tab’ Delimiter with ‘Cut’ Command

bashcut

Here is an example of using cut to break input into fields using a space delimiter, and obtaining the second field:

cut -f2 -d' '

How can the delimiter be defined as a tab, instead of a space?

Two ways:

Press Ctrl+V and then Tab to use "verbatim" quoted insert.

cut -f2 -d'   ' infile

or write it like this to use ANSI-C quoting:

cut -f2 -d$'\t' infile

Reverse the input before and after cut with rev:

<infile rev | cut -d, -f2 | rev

Output:

d
i
n

Short grep approach:

grep -Eo '([ao]ff|trans)_id=[^&]+' file

The output:

aff_id=5863
off_id=85635
trans_id=easoli4ddq8sssdf

----------

Or awk solution for fixed item order:

awk -F'[?&]' '{ printf "%s %s %s\n",$2,$3,$4 }' file

The output:

aff_id=5863 off_id=85635 trans_id=easoli4ddq8sssdf