Hi,

a new pal in this great group...Hello everyone!

so what i need is to be able to cut a line vertically at different columns of course using the 'cut' command.
say like there is a line in a file a.txt which reads
"I am a boy."(excluding the " marks)

so i want to have in my output
I boy

what i thot of is
cat a.txt | cut -c1-1 -c8-10

but this when tried does not take all the -c's but only the last. so in this case i get boy and the first -c parameter goes unheeded..

any other way of using this cut or any other utility to have what i want?

bye

You must specify only one -c option.
With this option you can specify a list of ranges separated by commas.

Don't use 'cat' when you can specify the input file for the command.

hi,

thanks for the help...but later i found me helpless again..
so what i want now is to be able to place the columns wherever i want
so if i wanna concat 38-41 columns with 25 column and make it a single number say i am not able to do it....what it does is go from 1st column to the last and output the columns serially if asked for in the command....
so in this case i will get the number i want as

[25][38-41] and not as [38-41][25] which is what i want...

and again i also cannot delimit the columns in the output..like say
cut -c4-7," "1-2 a.txt

to get separate columns in the output

You can do it with 'awk'


$0
The record read from file

substr(STRING, START [, LENGTH])

This returns a LENGTH-character-long substring of STRING, starting
at character number START. The first character of a string is
character number one. For example, `substr("washington", 5, 3)'
returns `"ing"'.

If LENGTH is not present, this function returns the whole suffix of
STRING that begins at character number START. For example,
`substr("washington", 5)' returns `"ington"'. The whole suffix is
also returned if LENGTH is greater than the number of characters
character number one. For example, `substr("washington", 5, 3)'
returns `"ing"'.

If LENGTH is not present, this function returns the whole suffix of
STRING that begins at character number START. For example,
`substr("washington", 5)' returns `"ington"'. The whole suffix is
also returned if LENGTH is greater than the number of characters
remaining in the string, counting from character number START.

print statement

The `print' statement does output with simple, standardized
formatting. You specify only the strings or numbers to be printed, in a
list separated by commas. They are output, separated by single spaces,
followed by a newline. The statement looks like this:

print ITEM1, ITEM2, ...

Thanks a lot..this wudd help me....
i think i think of only in one direction....i was after cut only when awk is fit and happy to help me out..

now u go for replying my latest post..