How to Use cut to Separate by Multiple Whitespace

columnscuttext processing

I have this input, which is displayed in columns. I would like to get the last column of this sample:

[  3]  1.0- 2.0 sec  1.00 MBytes  8.39 Mbits/sec
[  3]  2.0- 3.0 sec   768 KBytes  6.29 Mbits/sec
[  3]  3.0- 4.0 sec   512 KBytes  4.19 Mbits/sec
[  3]  4.0- 5.0 sec   256 KBytes  2.10 Mbits/sec
...

If I use

cut -d\  -f 13

I get

Mbits/sec
6.29
4.19
2.10

because sometimes there are additional spaces in between.

Best Answer

If we use tr command along with squeeze option (-s flag ) to convert all multiple consecutive spaces to a single space and then perform cut operation with space as delimiter – we can access the required column carrying the numbers.

Refer to the code snipped bellow:

cat file | tr -s ' ' | cut -d ' ' -f 8

Related Solutions

How to use when cut doesn’t cut it

Awk (also check Awk Info) is beautiful with that sort of question. Try:

awk -F'[],] *' '{print $2}' cities

This defines a field separator -F as [],] * - which means one occurence of either a closing square bracket or a comma, followed by zero or any number of spaces. Of course you can change that to suit any requirement. Read up on regular expressions.

Once the line is split, you can do what you want with the split result. Here, I decided to print out the second field only with print $2. Note that it is important to use single quotes around the awk instructions otherwise $2 gets substituted by the shell.

Lum – cut column 2 from text file

It is easiest with awk which treats multiple consecutive spaces as a single one, so

awk '{print $2}' file

prints

207
412
431

But obviously there are many, many other tools which will do the job, even not designed to such task as grep:

grep -Po '^[^ ]+[ ]+\K[^ ]+' file

Best Answer

Related Solutions

How to use when cut doesn’t cut it

Lum – cut column 2 from text file

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