The cut command

A useful command in bash scripts you can use to parse data

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While trying to parse out errors and bits of logs or information in bash scripts I often find myself using cut. I thought I’d write a quick summary of how that command works here.

The cut command allows you to obtain a piece of a string based on a delimiter. Here’s the gist of it.

A delimiter can be any character such as a comma. It is the character that separates the parts of the string you want to get into a variable of view on the screen.

Let’s say you have a value like this:

apples,organges,bananas

The delimiter is the comma.

Let’s say you want to get the “apples” out of that string.

Set the variable to the value:

fruits="apples,oranges,bananas"

Echo the value to screen:

echo $fruits

Add a pipe character after the echo command which allows us to send the output of that command…