Question

I am using this command:

cut -d: -f2

To sort and reedit text, Is there a more efficient way to do this without using sed or awk?

I would also like to know how I would append a period to the end of each field

At the moment the output is like $x[‘s’] and I would like it to be $x[‘s’] .

Just using standard unix tools

edit: I just wanted to know if it was possible without sed or awk, otherwise how would you do it with awk?

Answer 1

Short answer: not really

Longer answer: cut is intended for slicing up lines of text, it does that well. If you need a more complicated behavior, you’ll need a text manipulation language. You have rejected the old time answers, so I’ll recommend perl.

---

Any particular reason you don’t want to use sed or awk?