cut Command in Linux: Extract Columns and Fields from Text Files

The command cut in Linux literally translated means to cut. It reads the content of one or more files and outputs a vertical column.

Its most frequent options are:

• -b number: Prints a vertical list with byte number (from left to right);
• -c number: Prints a vertical list with character number (from left to right);
• -d delimiter: Sets the delimiter that separates one column from another. The default is Tab;
• -f number: Prints column number.

Examples:

To get only the logins of user accounts in the /etc/passwd file, using cut. In this case the delimiter will be ":" and the first column.

$ cut –d":" -f 1 /etc/passwd

To get only the first byte of the /etc/passwd file:

$ cut –b 1 /etc/passwd

To get group names:

$ cat /etc/group | cut -f1 -d':'

The cut command works exactly like the awk command. The following example produces the same result as the previous command:

$ awk -F':' '{ print $1 }' /etc/group

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