Re: reading the first colums of text file

[Bob Proulx]

flowdimow wrote:
> I have a text file (a table) and I want to read it and output only a 
> defined number of colums. Does anybody know how to do this?

Depending on if the data is by character column or by whitespace
separated field I would use either cut or awk.

  echo abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz | cut -c3-4,14-23
  cdnopqrstuvw

  echo one two three four five six seven | awk '{print$2,$NF}'
  two seven

Bob