Bash Quick Start Guide

The cut command

The cut command is most often used to select single columns of data from input separated by a single character, such as an /etc/passwd file. For example, this command line prints the home directories of every user on a GNU/Linux system:

$ cut -d: -f6 /etc/passwd
/root
/usr/sbin
/bin
...

In this example, -d specifies the delimiter or separator variable, in this case a colon, and -f specifies the number of the field (or column), starting from 1.

We can also specify the field numbers with hyphen-separated ranges, and/or comma-separated indices:

$ cut -d: -f1,6 /etc/passwd
root:/root
daemon:/usr/sbin
bin:/bin
...
$ cut -d: -f1,3-4 /etc/passwd
root:0:0
daemon:1:1
bin:2:2
...

We can leave one of the numbers out of a range, to mean ...