Cut command in Linux (cut by columns) [Basic Guide]

The cut command in Linux literally translated means cut. It reads the content of one or more files and outputs a vertical column.

Your most frequent options are:

• -b number: Prints a vertical list with the number byte (from left to right);
• -c number: Prints a vertical list with the number character (from left to right);
• -d delimiter: Configures the delimiter that separates one column from another. The default is the Tab;
• -f number: Prints column number.

Examples:

To get only user account logins from the /etc/passwd file, using cut. In this case the delimiter will be the “:” and the first column.

$ cut —d”:” -f 1 /etc/passwd

To take just the first byte of the /etc/passwd file:

$ cut —b 1 /etc/passwd

To get group names:

$ cat /etc/group | cut -f1 -d': '

The cut command works just like the awk command. The following example produces the same result as the previous command:

$ awk -F': '' {print $1} '/etc/group