To be fair, a lot of the programs don’t use a single character, have multiple spaces between fields, and cut doesn’t collapse whitespace characters, so you probably want something more like tr -s " "|cut -d" " -f3 if you want behavior like awk’s field-splitting.
Honestly I think 90% of people would never use awk if there was a simple preinstalled command for “print the nth column”
This is definitely somewhere that PowerShell shines, all of that is built in and really easy to use
cut?
To be fair, a lot of the programs don’t use a single character, have multiple spaces between fields, and
cut
doesn’t collapse whitespace characters, so you probably want something more liketr -s " "|cut -d" " -f3
if you want behavior likeawk
’s field-splitting.I never understood why so many bash scripts pipe grep to awk when regex is one of its main strengths.
Like… Why
grep ^nvme0n1 | awk '{print $3}'
over just
awk '/^nvme0n1/ {print $3}'
cut and tr are like the wonder twins of text munging