Re: wishlist: give cut(1) option to split fields on whitespace

[Mike Coleman]

Pádraig,

I'm actually interested in whitespace blocks, rather than just runs of
spaces, but I see that this was also discussed at the link.  I suppose
from a typability and readability standpoint I still prefer 'awk' to
the alternative

    $ tr '[:blank:]' ' ' | cut -d ' ' -f 3-5

although I'd still love to see the mooted

    $ cut -w 3-5

since this seems like such a frequent CL use case.

More than that, I'm intrigued by the rationale for this decision.
While I can appreciate conservatism on things like this, it's
difficult to imagine any change other than i18n or bugfixes that would
pass this criterion.  And if changes are locked out, I wonder if
coreutils/etc will ultimately ossify into one of those relics I
remember wondering about when I got started in the 80s...

Thank you for the link and the insight!
Mike

P.S.  +1 for the domain name...  :-)







2009/9/9 Pádraig Brady <address@hidden>:
> Mike Coleman wrote:
>> It would be really nice if cut(1) could split fields using whitespace
>> as a separator (as many other text tools do).  Currently I use
>>
>>     $ awk '{ print $3, $4, $5 }'
>>
>> for this sort of thing, but it seems relatively klutzy, as opposed to (say)
>>
>>     $ cut -w -f 3-5
>
> That was discussed a while ago:
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2009-05/msg00153.html
>
> In summary the existing `tr -s '[:blank:]' | cut -d ' '`
> was (marginally) deemed sufficient rather than supporting
> cut -d '[:blank:]'
>
> cheers,
> Pádraig.
>