[ILUG] unic cut question

[Caolan McNamara]

On Mon, Jul 16, 2001 at 12:09:08PM +0100, John P. Looney wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 16, 2001 at 11:49:54AM +0100, hrishy mentioned:
> > but i wnat to the output to conatin a particular
> > column only say forx 3rd column.how di i do this??
> 
>  ls -l | cut -f6 -d' '
> 
>  or some such. Massage the -f field as you need.

I reckon the use of cut with ls is problematic, cut's fields are single
characters. ls pads between columns with multiple spaces. Given 

ls -l 
total 2
drwx--x--x   5 caolan staff         96 Jul 16 09:16 SRC638
-rw-------  11 caolan staff        251 Jul 16 12:15 SRC637

your cut has one less field in the second line giving

caolan
staff

as its output, try awk which has a whitespace as its delimitator
ls -l | awk '{print $3}'

and to avoid the blank line from the "total 2"
ls -l | awk '{if ($3) print $3}'

C.
-- 
Caolan McNamara               |  caolan at skynet.ie  
http://www.skynet.ie/~caolan  |  +353 86 8161184
Belief is no substitute for arithmetic