Extract Text

cut is a good cool to extract text that follows some schema such as tab or comma delimited.

Create A File With Comma Separated Text

echo "chris, 34, male" >> staff.txt
echo "sarah, 22, female" >> staff.txt
echo "Bob, 59, male" >> staff.txt

View File

cat staff.txt

chris, 34, male
sarah, 22, female
Bob, 59, male

Extract Text By Breaking Into Columns

cut the text in staff.txt that is separated by commas (-d ',') into columns, then take the second (-f 2) column.

cut -d ',' -f 2 staff.txt

 34
 22
 59

## Extract Certain Chunk Of Characters From Each Row

cut the text in staff.txt up such that we return the second to the fifth (-c 2-5) characters of each line.

 cut -c 2-5 staff.txt

hris
arah
ob,