| CUT(1P) | POSIX Programmer's Manual | CUT(1P) |
This manual page is part of the POSIX Programmer's Manual. The Linux implementation of this interface may differ (consult the corresponding Linux manual page for details of Linux behavior), or the interface may not be implemented on Linux.
cut — cut out selected fields of each line of a file
cut -b list [-n] [file...]
cut -c list [file...]
cut -f list [-d delim] [-s] [file...]
The cut utility shall cut out bytes (-b option), characters (-c option), or character-delimited fields (-f option) from each line in one or more files, concatenate them, and write them to standard output.
The cut utility shall conform to the Base Definitions volume of POSIX.1‐2017, Section 12.2, Utility Syntax Guidelines.
The application shall ensure that the option-argument list (see options -b, -c, and -f below) is a <comma>-separated list or <blank>-separated list of positive numbers and ranges. Ranges can be in three forms. The first is two positive numbers separated by a <hyphen-minus> (low-high), which represents all fields from the first number to the second number. The second is a positive number preceded by a <hyphen-minus> (-high), which represents all fields from field number 1 to that number. The third is a positive number followed by a <hyphen-minus> (low-), which represents that number to the last field, inclusive. The elements in list can be repeated, can overlap, and can be specified in any order, but the bytes, characters, or fields selected shall be written in the order of the input data. If an element appears in the selection list more than once, it shall be written exactly once.
The following options shall be supported:
Each element in list of the form low- shall be treated as above with high set to the number of bytes in the current line, not including the terminating <newline>. Each element in list of the form -high shall be treated as above with low set to 1. Each element in list of the form num (a single number) shall be treated as above with low set to num and high set to num.
The following operand shall be supported:
The standard input shall be used only if no file operands are specified, or if a file operand is '-'. See the INPUT FILES section.
The input files shall be text files, except that line lengths shall be unlimited.
The following environment variables shall affect the execution of cut:
Default.
The cut utility output shall be a concatenation of the selected bytes, characters, or fields (one of the following):
"%s\n", <concatenation of bytes>
"%s\n", <concatenation of characters>
"%s\n", <concatenation of fields and field delimiters>
The standard error shall be used only for diagnostic messages.
None.
None.
The following exit values shall be returned:
Default.
The following sections are informative.
The cut and fold utilities can be used to create text files out of files with arbitrary line lengths. The cut utility should be used when the number of lines (or records) needs to remain constant. The fold utility should be used when the contents of long lines need to be kept contiguous.
Earlier versions of the cut utility worked in an environment where bytes and characters were considered equivalent (modulo <backspace> and <tab> processing in some implementations). In the extended world of multi-byte characters, the new -b option has been added. The -n option (used with -b) allows it to be used to act on bytes rounded to character boundaries. The algorithm specified for -n guarantees that:
cut -b 1-500 -n file > file1 cut -b 501- -n file > file2
ends up with all the characters in file appearing exactly once in file1 or file2. (There is, however, a <newline> in both file1 and file2 for each <newline> in file.)
Examples of the option qualifier list:
The low-high forms are not always equivalent when used with -b and -n and multi-byte characters; see the description of -n.
The following command:
cut -d : -f 1,6 /etc/passwd
reads the System V password file (user database) and produces lines of the form:
<user ID>:<home directory>
Most utilities in this volume of POSIX.1‐2017 work on text files. The cut utility can be used to turn files with arbitrary line lengths into a set of text files containing the same data. The paste utility can be used to create (or recreate) files with arbitrary line lengths. For example, if file contains long lines:
cut -b 1-500 -n file > file1 cut -b 501- -n file > file2
creates file1 (a text file) with lines no longer than 500 bytes (plus the <newline>) and file2 that contains the remainder of the data from file. (Note that file2 is not a text file if there are lines in file that are longer than 500 + {LINE_MAX} bytes.) The original file can be recreated from file1 and file2 using the command:
paste -d "\0" file1 file2 > file
Some historical implementations do not count <backspace> characters in determining character counts with the -c option. This may be useful for using cut for processing nroff output. It was deliberately decided not to have the -c option treat either <backspace> or <tab> characters in any special fashion. The fold utility does treat these characters specially.
Unlike other utilities, some historical implementations of cut exit after not finding an input file, rather than continuing to process the remaining file operands. This behavior is prohibited by this volume of POSIX.1‐2017, where only the exit status is affected by this problem.
The behavior of cut when provided with either mutually-exclusive options or options that do not work logically together has been deliberately left unspecified in favor of global wording in Section 1.4, Utility Description Defaults.
The OPTIONS section was changed in response to IEEE PASC Interpretation 1003.2 #149. The change represents historical practice on all known systems. The original standard was ambiguous on the nature of the output.
The list option-arguments are historically used to select the portions of the line to be written, but do not affect the order of the data. For example:
echo abcdefghi | cut -c6,2,4-7,1
yields "abdefg".
A proposal to enhance cut with the following option:
was rejected because this type of enhancement is outside the scope of the IEEE P1003.2b draft standard.
None.
Section 2.5, Parameters and Variables, fold, grep, paste
The Base Definitions volume of POSIX.1‐2017, Chapter 8, Environment Variables, Section 12.2, Utility Syntax Guidelines
Portions of this text are reprinted and reproduced in electronic form from IEEE Std 1003.1-2017, Standard for Information Technology -- Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX), The Open Group Base Specifications Issue 7, 2018 Edition, Copyright (C) 2018 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc and The Open Group. In the event of any discrepancy between this version and the original IEEE and The Open Group Standard, the original IEEE and The Open Group Standard is the referee document. The original Standard can be obtained online at http://www.opengroup.org/unix/online.html .
Any typographical or formatting errors that appear in this page are most likely to have been introduced during the conversion of the source files to man page format. To report such errors, see https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/reporting_bugs.html .
| 2017 | IEEE/The Open Group |