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How To Split or Cut A File Vertically(Column wise)

Posted on April 6, 2009 by Ganesh Sharma

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In Unix environment it’s often required to print specific columns from a file. If the rows of file are having some proper delimiters then other Unix command like awk come into picture and quite handy. But if say you want to print out the 5th character and then 7th to 16th character, then other commands fail and in such situations the cut command comes to rescue. Here is short primer of cut command.

For our example I have taken a file named as list. Its output is pasted below:

[ganesh@host ~]$ cat list

-rwxr-xr-x|1|root|root|1904|Nov|10|2007|crond

-rwxr-xr-x|1|root|root|1505|Jan|6|2007|dc_client

-rwxr-xr-x|1|root|root|1347|Jan|6|2007|dc_server

Let’s say you want the 4th column from the above output.

Use the below command:

cut -c4 list

Here c signifies the number of column.

The output is:

[ganesh@host ~]$ cut -c4 list

x

Now let’s say you want 3rd to 10th column. You can specify mth to nth fields as m-n as you’ll see in examples. Use the below command:

cut -c3-10 list

[ganesh@host ~]$ cut -c3-10 list

wxr-xr-x

wxr-xr-x

wxr-xr-x

Now let’s say you want 4th to 16th column and everything after 20th column

Use the below command:

cut -c4-10,16- list

[ganesh@host ~]$ cut -c4-10,16- list

xr-xr-xot|root|1904|Nov|10|2007|crond

xr-xr-xot|root|1505|Jan|6|2007|dc_client

xr-xr-xot|root|1347|Jan|6|2007|dc_server

Remember there is no space provided between multiple cuts taken from a file. You see -xot in the output. xr-xr-x is one output and ot|root|1904|Nov|10|2007|crond is another output.

Now let’s say the file is delimited by a separator e.g ‘|’. Here cut gives you a special option ‘-d’. It’s used to specifiy the delimiter and then the filed on it.

The following example makes it a little bit clear.

Suppose you want to get the 1st to 3rd field, 5th to 6th field and then 8th onwards all fields, based on | as delimiter.

Use the command:

cut -d ‘|’ -f 1-3,5-6,8- list

[ganesh@host ~]$ cut -d ‘|’ -f 1-3,5-6,8- list

-rwxr-xr-x|1|root|1904|Nov|2007|crond

-rwxr-xr-x|1|root|1505|Jan|2007|dc_client

-rwxr-xr-x|1|root|1347|Jan|2007|dc_server

In some future post I’ll write about pasting the outputs.

1 thought on “How To Split or Cut A File Vertically(Column wise)”

  1. Kishor Ahuja says:
    April 7, 2009 at 22:40

    Hi Ganesh,
    Let me know the ways to ZIP the complete directory structure on Unix system. If there are multiple ways then which one is best and why? I have to move applications from one server to another, for that I need this information.

    Any help will be appriciated.

    Reply

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