How to define ‘tab’ delimiter with ‘cut’ in Bash?

Here is an example of using cut to break input into fields using a space delimiter, and obtaining the second field:

cut -f2 -d' '

How can the delimiter be defined as a tab, instead of a space?

Answers:

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Method 1

Two ways:

Press Ctrl+V and then Tab to use “verbatim” quoted insert.

cut -f2 -d'   ' infile

or write it like this to use ANSI-C quoting:

cut -f2 -d$'t' infile

The $'...' form of quotes isn’t part of the POSIX shell language (not yet), but works at least in ksh, mksh, zsh and Busybox in addition to Bash.

Method 2

Tab is the default.

See the cut man page.

-d delim
         Use delim as the field delimiter character instead of the tab
         character.

So you should just write

cut -f 2

Method 3

awk -F 't' '{ print $2 }' inputfile

This extracts the second tab-delimited field of each line of input from inputfile.

Method 4

More generically, without requiring any invisible characters: Use tr to convert the delimiters to a format that can be specified more easily to cut.

$ echo -e "atbtc" |tr 't' ' ' |cut -d' ' -f2
b

tr is a simple, but powerful, character matching and replacement tool.

Method 5

Alternatively, one could wrap cut in a function.

function getColumns ()
{
    local -r delimiter="${1:?}"
    local -r columns="${2:?}"

    if [[ "$delimiter" == 't' || "$delimter" == "tab" ]]; then
        cut "--fields=${columns}"
        return
    fi

    cut "--delimiter=${delimiter}" "--fields=${columns}" 
}

Method 6

I use TAB and cut in these ways:

# quote the whole thing, use TAB escape
cut "-dt" -f 2
# just quote the tab escape 
cut -d "t" -f 2
# Use Ctrl-V to quote Ctrl-I (TAB is Ctrl-I, see man ascii)
cut -d^V^I -f 2

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0