cut in a script

[ROSS HANSON]

Hello
I am trying to write a script that gives me a swlist, and other
things, I am trying to cut out
some "tabs" How do I cut out tabs
using the cut command???

[Rodney Hills]

If you use the following "awk" command-

swlist | awk '/^ /{print $1 ":" $2 ":" $3}'

This will replace the tabs with ":".

Hope this helps.

-- Rod Hills

[harry d brown jr]

try this:

swlist | cut -d"Ctrl-vCtrli" -f2

Ctrl-v and Ctrl-i should put a tab in "cut" as a seperator.

live free or die
harry

[Peter Gillis]

Hi,
I just tried:
swlist|cut -f1
this gave me just col. 1.
Looked in 'cut' man pages - tab delimiter is the default, so i figure no need to actually specify it, when used with -f.

see ya.
Maria

[Nick Wickens]

I often find its usefull to translate the tabs into spaces and then remove repeated spaces using this command string -

tr '\011' ' ' | tr -s " "

Or you could simply change successive tabs into one tab with tr -s "\011"

[Mark van Hassel]

Hi,

Sometimes its difficult using awk to differentiate between the colums beacuse of the difference in the amounts of tabs, spaces etc. You can use the folowing:

swlist -l product -a size -a install_date -a description | while read SIZE DATE DESC
do
...
done

This way you can seperate the different columns, just have description as the last column.

HtH,
Mark

[H.Merijn Brand (procura]

Expanding tabs to spaces *keeping* the format (column-wise) can be done with the command 'expand'

cut -f1 works on tabs, so - as Maria already said - should just give what you need.

If you have `expand'ed your tabs, you can switch to

cut -c1-9 to get the first nine characters of each line (or -c16-55 for columns 16 though 55, see man cut), including the white space

cut also accepts a -d option to specify the delimiter

cut -d\ -f3 ...