cut command in admin script

[Michael Murphy_2]

I am using the cut command in a admin script to parse through a file with delimeter of ":". If I return one field from a file I just get the field itself. When I return two fields as in: cut -d : -f 1,2 I get the fields back as well as the delimeter seperating them. Is this expected - is there a way to get just the fields back?

[Thierry Poels_1]

hi,

this is normal behaviour.

Workarounds?
- two separate cut commands?
- translate (tr) the delimeter in the result to something else?
- ...

good luck,
Thierry.

[RAC_1 · Accepted solution]

As told, this is normal behaviour.
Options -tr and awk.

awk -F : '{print $1, $2}' input_file

Anil

[Rodney Hills]

How about "awk"

awk -F: 'print $1,$2' yourfile

HTH

-- Rod Hills

[A. Clay Stephenson]

This is normal cut behavior. A better tool is awk:

cat myfile | awk -F '.' '{ print $1,$2 }'

should do just what you want; more over if you would like to read them into 2 shell variables in a loop that is easy as well.

cat myfile | awk -F '.' '{ print $1,$2 }' | while read F1 F2
do
echo "F1 = ${F1} F2 = ${F2}"
done

[Michael Schulte zur Sur]

Hi,

use awk -F: '{print $1" "$2}' file

greetings,

Michael

[Stuart Whitby]

You need to use "\:" instead of just ":". The command should work fine.

[Michael Murphy_2]

Thanks one and all...