[PLUG] Specifying white space as delimiter for 'cut'

Rich Shepard rshepard at appl-ecosys.com
Mon Nov 7 15:47:41 UTC 2016


   I tried using cut to list permissions and filenames from a directory
listing, example:

   ls -l | cut -d"\b" -f 1,9 > temp.txt

but the delimiter is more than a single character. Using  -d " " for the
delimiter does not work as there are more than a single space separating
fields, and the white space is not uniformly a tab.

   The man page and results from my web searches haven't shown me how to
correctly specify the delimiter.

   Here's an example listing from ~/;

$ ls -l | head

-rw-r--r--  1 rshepard users       14 Nov  5 08:30 CURRENTIP
drwxrwxr-x  2 rshepard users     4096 Nov  8  2010 Desktop/
drwx------  2 rshepard users     4096 Oct 18  2014 Downloads/
drwx------  8 rshepard users     4096 Nov  7 05:39 Dropbox/
drwxr-xr-x  2 rshepard users     4096 Jul  6 08:31 News/
drwxrwxr-x 44 rshepard users     4096 Nov  4 10:47 R/
-rw-r--r--  1 rshepard users  2569555 Oct 31 16:29 rue2009.pdf
-rw-r--r--  1 rshepard users    14052 Dec  4  2015 UTF-8-demo.txt
-rw-r--r--  1 rshepard users  1318075 Oct 25 10:16 al-rawas2011.pdf

and I want to extract fields 1 and 9.

TIA,

Rich





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