Shell Tricks - Extracting A Column From A Text File

There have been times when I’ve had to extract a particular column from a tab-separated or comma-separated file. The best way to do this is to use the shell command cut. Let’s say I have a file named input.txt that looks like this:

{% include_code cut/input.txt lang:apacheconf %}

If I want to extract just the User Id column, I could type in the following:

cut -d ',' -f 3 input.txt

Here the -d option specifies the delimeter and the -f option specifies the field(s) to be extracted. The command above would generate the following output:

User Id
aijaz
js
guptas

If I want to include line numbers, I can use the nl shell filter:

$ cut -d ',' -f 3 input.txt | nl -ba
     1  User Id
     2  aijaz
     3  js
     4  guptas
$

If I want the User Id and Used columns, I could do:

$ cut -d ',' -f 3,5 input.txt 
User Id,Used
aijaz,2200
js,3300
guptas,1500
$

As one would expect, I can change the order in which fields appear by using -f 3,5,1, for instance.

Look at the man page for cut for more options, including how to extract specific bytes from each line.