Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!sample.eng.ohio-state.edu!rainier!juodvalk From: juodvalk@ee.eng.ohio-state.edu (Vincent Vladas Juodvalkis) Subject: Delimeters when using the "cut" tool. Message-ID: Date: Thu, 04 Apr 91 18:50:42 GMT Organization: The Ohio State University Dept of Electrical Engineering Distribution: na Originator: juodvalk@rainier.eng.ohio-state.edu I am trying to write a program in sh that will check a user's quota before allowing them to use the compress tool. I have the program writen and am now in the process of finding the thousand or so errors that I always manage to code into a fifty line program. Anyway, I am relatively new to shell programming and am having dificulty with the cut tool. What I need to use it for is to get one integer out of the output I get from the command "quota -v". The output from this command is inconsistant between users so I cannot just use the collumn feature of cut. The output from "quota -v" looks like this... Disk quotas for juodvalk (uid 2360): Filesystem usage quota limit timeleft files quota limit timeleft /tmp_mnt/homea 972 50000 50500 33 0 0 I use the line `quota -v 2>&1 | grep -v quota | grep -v /` to get 972 50000 50500 33 0 0 Now my problem comes when I try to cut this line. If I just try to cut it by filed, trying to get the second field (50000), using the following quota -v 2>&1 | grep -v quota | grep -v / | cut -f2 the output I get is 972 50000 50500 33 0 0 Which is the same as before. The reason that I came up with for this is that the generic delimeter is a tab, and this seemed to imply that the spaces in the output were not tabs. So I tried using spaces as the delimeter. The code I osed looked like quota -v 2>&1 | grep -v quota | grep -v / | cut -d" " -f2 the output I got was just a bank line. My hypothesis for this is that the cut cuts after the first space it encounters and returns all that ir finds until the next space it encounters (which in this case happens to be the very next character, thus returning a line with nothing in it). What I need is either a was to get rid of all the extra spaces, or maybe just a better way to cut up the lines. I would appreciate any suggestion. Vincent ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Vincent V. Juodvalkis "I can still move... juodvalk@ee.eng.ohio-state.edu I can still drink." juodvalk@cis.ohio-state.edu -Robert Reed The Ohio State University