Occasionally, I will have to deal with a text file in a fixed width text format. In Linux, you can extract specific columns easily using cut
cut -b 1-10,15-20 < infile
This will give you column 1-10 and 15-20 of your “infile”
The additional option that is nice when you want to get rid of a few columns and keep the rest of them is using the option –complement (although from what I have heard, some systems might not have this implemented).
cut –complement -b 11,14,32,43-47,58-62,73-77,88-92,103-108 < infile
Other use of cut is to extract columns from any other type of file with delimiter such as “,” or space
by adding the option -d”_your_delim_” to the example above, and you can extract your infile.csv or infile.txt as well.
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