Introduction

The cut command is a fast way to extract parts of lines of text files. It belongs to the oldest Unix commands. Its most popular implementations are the GNU version found on Linux and the FreeBSD version found on MacOS, but each flavor of Unix has its own. See below for differences. The input lines are read either from stdin or from files listed as arguments on the command line.

Syntax

• cut -f1,3 # extract first and third tab-delimited field (from stdin)
• cut -f1-3 # extract from first up to third field (ends included)
• cut -f-3 # -3 is interpreted as 1-3
• cut -f2- # 2- is interpreted as from the second to the last
• cut -c1-5,10 # extract from stdin the characters in positions 1,2,3,4,5,10
• cut -s -f1 # suppress lines not containing delimiters
• cut –complement -f3 # (GNU cut only) extract all fields except the third

Parameters

|Parameter|Details| |:—|:—| |-f, –fields| Field-based selection |-d, –delimiter| Delimiter for field-based selection |-c, –characters| Character-based selection, delimiter ignored or error |-s, –only-delimited| Suppress lines with no delimiter characters (printed as-is otherwise) |–complement| Inverted selection (extract all except specified fields/characters |–output-delimiter| Specify when it has to be different from the input delimiter

Remarks

1. Syntax differences

Long options in the table above are only supported by the GNU version.

2. No character gets special treatment

FreeBSD cut (which comes with MacOS, for example) doesn’t have the --complement switch, and, in the case of character ranges, one can use the colrm command instead:

$ cut --complement -c3-5 <<<"123456789"
126789

$ colrm 3 5 <<<"123456789"
126789

However, there is a big difference, because colrm treats TAB characters (ASCII 9) as real tabulations up to the next multiple of eight, and backspaces (ASCII 8) as -1 wide; on the contrary, cut treats all characters as one column wide.

$ colrm  3 8 <<<$'12\\tABCDEF' # Input string has an embedded TAB
12ABCDEF

$ cut --complement -c3-8 <<<$'12\\tABCDEF'
12F