Linux command cut is used for text processing. You can use this command to extract portion of text from a file by selecting columns.
This tutorial provides few practical examples of cut command that you can use in your day to day command line activities.
For most of the example, we’ll be using the following test file.
$ cat test.txt cat command for file oriented operations. cp command for copy files or directories. ls command to list out files and directories with its attributes.
1. Select Column of Characters
To extract only a desired column from a file use -c option. The following example displays 2nd character from each line of a file test.txt
$ cut -c2 test.txt a p s
As seen above, the characters a, p, s are the second character from each line of the test.txt file.
2. Select Column of Characters using Range
Range of characters can also be extracted from a file by specifying start and end position delimited with -. The following example extracts first 3 characters of each line from a file called test.txt
$ cut -c1-3 test.txt cat cp ls
3. Select Column of Characters using either Start or End Position
Either start position or end position can be passed to cut command with -c option.
The following specifies only the start position before the ‘-‘. This example extracts from 3rd character to end of each line from test.txt file.
$ cut -c3- test.txt t command for file oriented operations. command for copy files or directories. command to list out files and directories with its attributes.
The following specifies only the end position after the ‘-‘. This example extracts 8 characters from the beginning of each line from test.txt file.
$ cut -c-8 test.txt cat comm cp comma ls comma
The entire line would get printed when you don’t specify a number before or after the ‘-‘ as shown below.
$ cut -c- test.txt cat command for file oriented operations. cp command for copy files or directories. ls command to list out files and directories with its attributes.
4. Select a Specific Field from a File
Instead of selecting x number of characters, if you like to extract a whole field, you can combine option -f and -d. The option -f specifies which field you want to extract, and the option -d specifies what is the field delimiter that is used in the input file.
The following example displays only first field of each lines from /etc/passwd file using the field delimiter : (colon). In this case, the 1st field is the username. The file
$ cut -d':' -f1 /etc/passwd root daemon bin sys sync games bala
5. Select Multiple Fields from a File
You can also extract more than one fields from a file or stdout. Below example displays username and home directory of users who has the login shell as “/bin/bash”.
$ grep "/bin/bash" /etc/passwd | cut -d':' -f1,6 root:/root bala:/home/bala
To display the range of fields specify start field and end field as shown below. In this example, we are selecting field 1 through 4, 6 and 7
$ grep "/bin/bash" /etc/passwd | cut -d':' -f1-4,6,7 root:x:0:0:/root:/bin/bash bala:x:1000:1000:/home/bala:/bin/bash
6. Select Fields Only When a Line Contains the Delimiter
In our /etc/passwd example, if you pass a different delimiter other than : (colon), cut will just display the whole line.
In the following example, we’ve specified the delimiter as | (pipe), and cut command simply displays the whole line, even when it doesn’t find any line that has | (pipe) as delimiter.
$ grep "/bin/bash" /etc/passwd | cut -d'|' -f1 root:x:0:0:root:/root:/bin/bash bala:x:1000:1000:bala,,,:/home/bala:/bin/bash
But, it is possible to filter and display only the lines that contains the specified delimiter using -s option.
The following example doesn’t display any output, as the cut command didn’t find any lines that has | (pipe) as delimiter in the /etc/passwd file.
$ grep "/bin/bash" /etc/passwd | cut -d'|' -s -f1
7. Select All Fields Except the Specified Fields
In order to complement the selection field list use option –complement.
The following example displays all the fields from /etc/passwd file except field 7
$ grep "/bin/bash" /etc/passwd | cut -d':' --complement -s -f7 root:x:0:0:root:/root bala:x:1000:1000:bala,,,:/home/bala
8. Change Output Delimiter for Display
By default the output delimiter is same as input delimiter that we specify in the cut -d option.
To change the output delimiter use the option –output-delimiter as shown below. In this example, the input delimiter is : (colon), but the output delimiter is # (hash).
$ grep "/bin/bash" /etc/passwd | cut -d':' -s -f1,6,7 --output-delimiter='#' root#/root#/bin/bash bala#/home/bala#/bin/bash
9. Change Output Delimiter to Newline
In this example, each and every field of the cut command output is displayed in a separate line. We still used –output-delimiter, but the value is $’\n’ which indicates that we should add a newline as the output delimiter.
$ grep bala /etc/passwd | cut -d':' -f1,6,7 --output-delimiter=$'\n' bala /home/bala /bin/bash
10. Combine Cut with Other Unix Command Output
The power of cut command can be realized when you combine it with the stdout of some other Unix command.
Once you master the basic usage of cut command that we’ve explained above, you can wisely use cut command to solve lot of your text manipulation requirements.
The following example indicates how you can extract only useful information from the ps command output. We also showed how we’ve filtered the output of ps command using grep and sed before the final output was given to cut command. Here, we’ve used cut option -d and -f which we’ve explained in the above examples.
$ ps axu | grep python | sed 's/\s\+/ /g' | cut -d' ' -f2,11- 2231 /usr/bin/python /usr/lib/unity-lens-video/unity-lens-video 2311 /usr/bin/python /usr/lib/unity-scope-video-remote/unity-scope-video-remote 2414 /usr/bin/python /usr/lib/ubuntuone-client/ubuntuone-syncdaemon 2463 /usr/bin/python /usr/lib/system-service/system-service-d 3274 grep --color=auto python
My name is Ramesh Natarajan. I will be posting instruction guides, how-to, troubleshooting tips and tricks on Linux, database, hardware, security and web. My focus is to write articles that will either teach you or help you resolve a problem. Read more about
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Hi,
simple and very nice and useful article
Great article.
Nice Article
Nice artical
Linux/Unix has lots of nice little utilities :o) I was not aware of cut, I have always used awk for these things. awk combined with sed is a kind of swiss pocket knife.
Thanks for article.
@Erlo For substitution awk can use gsub internal command instead of pipe into sed ?
I wish to extract specific data from a line
I mean
Input : OA.jsp?page=/hello/abc/123/a23/sam/store/web/helloworld&xyz=YES
Output: OA.jsp?page=/hello/abc/123/a23/sam/store/web/helloworld
& should act as delimiter. The length of the link may change.
What ever the link I pass the data before & should display.
How it is possible?
Well written and it has been useful for me. Thank you.
Hi
Please can you do me favor. I need a script to get the information of all hosts running on network like.
Name =Home user
Disk usage space =
Disk Available space =
Disk Total space =
IP Address =
Dear Ashok,
You can use the below script for your required O/P:
cat input.txt | cut -d’&’ -f1
One of the best articles I have found on the cut command..
Thanks for posting this..
With this command $ cut -c- test.txt
I am not getting any out.
Iam using fedora 19
Thanks..
Hi Sushil,
we need to mention the range while using cut with -c option.
like cut -c 1,5 test.txt.and cut -c 5- test.txt.
In the first e.g it will print the first five characters of each line.
In the second one, it will print the characters from 5 to the end of the line of each line.
It’s a proper and perfect docs 🙂
Thanks
Just now I was trying to google the practical examples of cut, got your blog. Revised all commands at once. Thanks for posting Bala.
I have a little problem how would i solve this? its an assignment for school
Your current directory is sample_dir. Display cars2 sorted numerically by the 4th field:
i understand i need to use the cut command just don’t know how
Simple and effective article.
find before first space and count
cat hdfs-info.log | grep USE_CrawlData | cut -d ‘ ‘ -f1 | awk ‘{ sum += $1 } END { print sum }’
nice article,good stuff !
Suppose i have a file called test.txt and within that files contents are like below
abc123defghij
345abckhhvds
mnggjabc74r2
here i want to print ony abc (like below) , how can we do this?
abc
abc
abc
How to select one hole column?
Great article. I’ve been using awk when cut would often do the trick for me far more simply. Probably a simple one here but, where you set delimiter -d’x’ … I can set a space and that works fine. But what if there are one or more spaces between fields. Seems the -f varies by number of spaces it hits. Wondering if it be smart enough to delimit on ‘ ‘+ or something like that. Thanks,
Very useful “Thank You”
Hi, the question is: may I pipe output of cut to another cut?
I use UnxUtils under windows 7 and when I tries to redirect the output of the first cut to the second I get next notification
grep -E “” file.txt | cut -d ‘ ‘ -f 2- | cut -d ‘ ‘ -f 3
cut: only one type of list may be specified
Try ‘cut –help’ for more information.
Thanks
So simple, So useful, Thanks
Hi ,
thanks for this , this was very simple and easy to understand
this is useful in our daily tasks which we do as admin
Great … helped me a lot to understand the delimiter 🙂
Great , it helped me a lot to understand specially delimiter 🙂
To get IP Address from ifconfig command using cut,
/sbin/ifconfig |grep Bcast|cut -d’:’ -f2|cut -d’ ‘ -f1
Hey Ramesh,
Thanks for this article. It is much simple and helpful for understanding the cut command.
Help full information of cut command
Itit possible to retain just the last field when the delimiter is space (-d’ “) and there are an unknown number of spaces before the last term? I know that awk has a last field number reference, but cut is so much simpler in my mind. I did find that repeated cuts using pipe | works, but that is the really hard way to get it done.
Very good article. Thanks !
This would be cool to get working in Windows, using the gnuwin32 versions of those Unix command line utilities.
But I fear that Window’s close-but-no-cigar world of the CMD shell would require all sorts of command line noddle bending to work. CMD’s quoting rules are difficult enough to wrestle with compared to Unix/Linux shells.
Loading the bash shell for Windows 10 isn’t really an option for me right now, either.
–output-delimiter=’#’