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First, thanks for the nice AWK tips there. I should learn more AWK.

I'm still using only cut, sed, tr, etc.... I'm working mostly on Windows (which I do not like much) but that's my job - so cygwin on the help.

As for your example for cut and white spaces, here is how it can be solved:

cut --help | sed -r "s/[ ]+/ /g" | cut "-d " -f 2-

I guess sed can be used to replace two or more spaces to one, and then preprocess...

You can "squeeze" spaces with tr (this might be GNUism, i'm not sure), which is what I do:

echo "blah blah" | tr -s ' ' | cut -f2 -d' '

Nice article. AWK! AWK!

Then it would be BSDism, too, because it works in FreeBSD, as I have just checked.



Nice sound, at least if Americans and Englishmen pronounce it correctly. :-) In Germany, awk is pronounced "ar way kar" letter-wise - shorter than "ay doubleyou kay" of course... "This is Ay Doubleyou Kay Radio 100.4 MHz, you're listening to Doctor Frasier Crane..." (see Focus Shift n - 1)... :-)

It's just sad HTML eats up all our pretty spaces so we can't demonstrate how nicely it works. It would be great to have <pre>...</pre> enabled here...

As you pointed out correctly, there are cases when cut isn't the best tool. But that's tht nature of a tool - use it for what's it good at, and don't use it when it creates more problems than simply using another tool.

Cases where cut is a good tool are, where
1. you just want one of n fields,
2. the field delimiter isn't a space or a tab and
3. when you don't need to care for multiple spaces or tabs.

I remember a case where all three cases were met: I needed a stupid script that would extract all the nicknames from my X-Chat log files, so I did - and don't try this at home, kids - the following stupidity:

cat ${LOGFILES} | grep "<" | grep ">" | grep -v "CTCP" | cut -d '<' -f 2 | cut -d '>' -f 1 | sort | uniq -d | xargs echo > nicklist.txt

After I entered it and saw that it worked, I thought that I'd have better used awk... :-)

Use the "-F" flag to specify the separator in awk.

In my experience, awk can always replace cut with ease, but the opposite isn't always true. Still, cut is lighter on resources and also more readable (the operation you're performing seems more explicit to me).