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cut — Video Man Page

By April 12, 2013September 12th, 2022No Comments

Another really useful utility from the Linux command line arsenal is cut. With this we are able to extract data by using the:

  • field -f
  • character -c
  • byte -b

Most useful will be the -f option to display one or more fields, this would be combined with the -d switch to designate the field separator.

To show just the user-name and UID, fields 1 and 3 from the /etc/passwd file we could use the syntax:

cut -f1,3 -d”:” /etc/passwd

We can see this and partial output from the following screenshot:

Like all of these tools the key is practice and thinking about your work and how you can use these tools to streamline the process.