Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!rice!uw-beaver!fluke!ssc-vax!bcsaic!paula
From: paula@bcsaic.UUCP (Paul Allen)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: cut.c
Message-ID: <18787@bcsaic.UUCP>
Date: 10 Jan 90 19:33:20 GMT
References: <5067@ast.cs.vu.nl>
Reply-To: paula@bcsaic.UUCP (Paul Allen)
Organization: Boeing Computer Services AI Center, Seattle
Lines: 33

In article <5067@ast.cs.vu.nl> ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum) writes:
>
>I treid using cut yesterday to extract the third column from a crc listing
>like this:
>
>65261   8510 alloc.c
>09176   7432 break.c
>53152    990 const.h
>
>I could not find any combination of -d and -i flags to convince it to consider
>a run of spaces as a separator.  I eventually did it with columns, but I
>think it ought to work with fields as well.  Does anyone (e.g., the author)
>know how to do this?

My experience with cut(1) on Suns and Ultrix is that a run of delimiter
characters is always a series of empty fields.  I suppose you could do
something like:

	(while read line
	 do
		echo $line
	 done) <myfile |cut -f3 -d\<space>

Slow for big files, but it works.  Does the System V cut(1) have an
option to treat runs of delimiters as a single delimiter?

Paul Allen


-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Paul L. Allen                       | pallen@atc.boeing.com
Boeing Advanced Technology Center   | ...!uw-beaver!bcsaic!pallen