I would like to add a feature to the cut command, I think

[Jeff Silverman]

I am trying to parse whitespace delimited files, and it seems 
intuitively obvious to me that I ought to be able to do it with the cut 
command.  Cut works fine with /etc/mtab, where the fields really and 
truly are delimited by a single space character.  But for files such as 
/etc/fstab, where the fields are delimited by any amount of white space, 
cut doesn't work so well.

Of course, I can do this with a one liner in perl, but that's not the point.

I'd like to modify the cut command to accept the -W switch, which says 
that the fields are white space delimited.  That should be a simple 
change, technically.  But it isn't clear to me how I go about getting 
the source code, testing my change under all operating systems and 
getting it accepted into the distributions.  Can you advise me?


Many thanks,


Jeff

--
Jeff Silverman,
Senior Computing Specialist 3, Fire and Environmental Research Applications
(FERA) team.  College of Forest Resources
jeffsilv at NOSPAM,PLEASE-u-washington-edu   (206) 732-7815
http://duet.cfr.washington.edu/~jeffs