Question

I have a command, for example: echo "word1 word2". I want to put a pipe (|) and get "word1" from the command.

echo "word1 word2" | ....

What should I put after the pipe?

Answer 1

AWK is a good option if you have to deal with trailing whitespace because it’ll take care of it for you:

echo "   word1  word2 " | awk '{print $1;}' # Prints "word1"

cut won’t take care of this though:

echo "  word1  word2 " | cut -f 1 -d " " # Prints nothing/whitespace

‘cut’ here prints nothing/whitespace, because the first thing before a space was another space.